Considered by some a political football when it was new, the movie shows 'liberal' Hollywood at its peak. Producer-star Kirk Douglas had won critical success with Paths of Glory, an anti-war movie that Came Right Out with the news that WW1 was an inhumane activity led by degenerates. Of course, Douglas chose the rather safe target of the French Army -- nobody ever faced a charge of anti-Americanism by slamming anything French. Paths of Glory was great moviemaking by the creative, resourceful intellectual Stanley Kubrick, but it of course reserves a huge show-off role for its producer-star. War may be futile but it's a hell of an opportunity for grandstanding oratory. Could the Red-baiting patriot Adolph Menjou have known he was being set up as a villain beyond the context of the movie?

Douglas starred in Richard Fleischer's lavish The Vikings, an intelligent costume epic that was seemingly restrained from aspiring to greater things. That film's producer Jerry Bresler would later try to "simplify" a film by a less cooperative director, Sam Peckinpah, with disastrous results. Actor Douglas realized that to stay at the top of his industry he needed to make and control an enormous epic. He courted quality and controversy, hiring a legendary cast of English stars and setting up blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo to secretly adapt Howard Fast's ardently leftist novel. Kirk Douglas hired the esteemed director Anthony Mann, only to run into creative differences early in the shooting -- both men clearly intended Spartacus to be a personal film. After Mann's departure Douglas turned the directing reins over to Stanley Kubrick, who used the massive epic as his steppingstone from low-budget United Artists work to the pinnacle of the profession. Kubrick kept his producer-star patron happy and concentrated on being the best ever director for hire. Naturally, the script invents plenty of dynamite scenes for Kirk: Spartacus revels in his new-found freedom, rallies his unwashed masses to defy the might of Rome, and finishes up with speeches basically saying, "Hey, I guess we tried, and if we should, heh heh, all get massacred by the Romans, well, someday somebody will make a great movie about us".

Aside from a moment or two of screeching ("All we wanna do is get OUT of this damn country!") this is Kirk Douglas's most iconic role. Now in his nineties, the actor has his physical infirmities but still impresses as a focused survivor, and is definitely not hiding away from the public. He must be intensely proud to see his youthful beauty (yep) preserved in Spartacus. He's in his prime here, past his rather pulpy years as a stage softie and before a decline spent sending up his own image. Spartacus is a lean 'n' mean physical specimen, an endorsement for the starvation and abuse of the slave lifestyle. The Thracian slave is Abraham Lincoln and Audie Murphy rolled into one, but also an intensely likeable guy adored by his men and loved by the incredibly attractive Jean Simmons.

Douglas was also no slouch in the producing department. Competing with fellow independent Otto Preminger in pushing the outside of the censorship envelope, Douglas slips in as much adult content and near-nudity as he dares. Roman femmes Nina Foch and Joanna Barnes snicker as they choose gladiators on the basis of which ones sexually excite them. Scenes of undisguised homosexual content (restored) and battle gore (one arm amputation restored for fun) originally got no further than a preview screening or two. But there's still the spectacle of Varinia (Jean Simmons) bobbing in a pond, the kind of "did you see that?" brinksmanship not attempted since the Pre-code days of Claudette Colbert in Sign of the Cross.

Who knows if these particular touches are Kubrick's? They display his flair for appalling clarity. The final conflict is a fairly standard violent melee, but the long preamble that leads up to it is a unique spectacle. The Romans are an organized machine designed to systematically mow down opposing foot soldiers. The camera lingers on Crassus' vast legions arranging themselves on the field of battle. The maneuvers make the battlefield look like a chessboard, and Kubrick was a chess enthusiast. Spartacus's horde of well-intentioned fighters hasn't a chance fighting this juggernaut on its own terms. The director's unflinching views of the coordinated Roman troops show us that the rebels' battle is well lost even before it is begun.

Universal's Blu-ray of Spartacus has been dealt an early thumbs-down vote by restorer Robert A. Harris, who has written that he finds the HD transfer deficient. Harris claims that it's soft, that over-used digital tools have blown away significant detail. He mentions 'halo'-ing around objects.

I looked at Spartacus, and this is how I felt about what I saw. The only scenes that looked noticeably off to me were the underground shots in the gladiator school, which seemed too bright. Everything else looked sharp and detailed, maybe not at as sharp as the eye-popping UK disc of Zulu but far sharper than a normal DVD. On my 67" Samsung rear-projection DLP LED (I think I got that description right) I noticed no halo-ing as described by Mr. Harris. Perhaps I'll be told that I'm not looking at the BD on an approved monitor?

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Spartacus Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: deleted scenes, interview selects, gladiator school BTS footage, newsreels, image galleries.
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: May 15, 2010

As it turned out, my kids were deeply impressed by the movie. My 12 year-old daughter took a phone call in the kitchen that evening and I got to listen to her side of a conversation with a girl friend. She stated that the movie was awesome, especially the endless line of crucified rebels at the conclusion. So the movie had made a dent after all. I know this footnote may be an inappropriate autobiographical tangent to a Spartacus review, but I think how we make use of movies is important.
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2. It's also possible that Universal, in the process of being bought by MCA, just didn't have the power to tell the producer what to do, and Douglas used that opening to finish the movie his way and officially break the blacklist by crediting Trumbo.
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I'm pretty sure that the beat-up print I saw in a theater in 1977 was this version -- I recall not seeing any shots of Douglas.
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For the record, I really enjoy DVD Beaver's analyses of various releases. It's not what I do. Reviewing transfer quality only makes sense to me in broad strokes -- will I feel cheated by a particular Blu-ray transfer? is it an unqualified disaster? Is it worse than a DVD we already have?
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