100 Words on Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (1960)

By Thomas M. Puhr

Kirk Douglas leads an army of freed slaves against Roman forces in Stanley Kubrick’s sword-and-sandal exercise. Despite the occasional brilliant touch—be it a campy exchange (Laurence Olivier explaining his preference for “both snails and oysters” to an alarmed Tony Curtis), an awe-inspiring tableau (the Roman army assuming geometrically flawless formations), or a shock of violence (a severed limb erupting with fire hydrant⁠–red blood)—Kubrick’s epic is interminably self-serious. Dalton Trumbo’s screenplay, in associating the ancients with a morally bankrupt America, anticipates Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey: a spectacle that will similarly exhaust audiences once it’s as old as Spartacus.