Stanley Kubrick's "Spartacus" – Swords and Sauce-ry

What can you say about Kubrick’s 1960 epic Spartacus?  It’s a beast.  Multiple writers, multiple directors, multiple luvvies.  Plenty of egos here, Kirk Douglas (Spartacus), Laurence Olivier (Crassus), Charles Laughton (Gracchus), not to mention Mr Mega-ego himself, Kubrick.  To echo a famous scene from the film, it sometimes feels like: “I’m fabulous.”  “I’m fabulous.”  “I’m fabulous…”  The result is sometimes messy as these heavyweights slug it out for influence and screen time, but also often entertaining and breathtaking.

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Spartacus makes no attempt to be historically accurate, so if you’re looking for a history lesson you won’t find it here.

It’s moulded into the epic genre so it’s got plenty of big, glib statements about slavery and religion but very little in the way of genuine human experience.  Spartacus is a hero from beginning to end.  Jean Simmons plays an out-and-out tart with a heart, apparently mentally un-scared at being pimped out nightly to the gladiators, and swiftly converted into Madonna mother figure once freed.

So perhaps the only way to rate the film is on how well it succeeds as an epic.  It does pretty well even after all this time.  Modern epics tend to squeeze in a few more battles.  The battles in the middle of Spartacus happen off-camera but the final big scene is amazing – and incomparably better for being filmed with real extras rather than the CGI armies which seem to be the only thing we see in recent films.  The Roman leaders are gloriously corrupt – particularly Peter Ustinov as Batiatus, the cynical owner of the gladiator school and Charles Laughton as Gracchus, whose face looks as though it is about to melt into a puddle of vice.  There are plenty of memorable scenes, including the gladiator fights and the revolt scenes and the initial salt mine sequence.  The music is suitably epic.

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But there are also self-indulgent sideways glances at the Cold War and at Hollywood’s anti-communist blacklists.  Some of the veiled homosexual references seem childish or forced into the screenplay – the famous pool scene with its oyster vs snail discussion, for example, is dramatically redundant since Crassus goes on to have his odd relationship with Spartacus’ wife but it is a memorable scene nonetheless, with its sinister overtones of control since it directed to Crassus’ male slave.  There are also plenty of Carry On-style comments about swollen armies and enormous Roman lords.

The female characters are a problem, as in so many of Kubrick’s films.  As well as the tart with a heart, we have a feisty old slave crone and two nasty companions to Crassus who insist on the gladiators performing fights to the death for sexual kicks.  “I feel so sorry for the poor things in all this heat.  Don’t put them in those suffocating tunics.  Let them wear just enough for modesty.”  You can almost hear Kubrick cackling, delighted at creating such bitches.

Personal Score: 5/10

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This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

Otto Preminger's "Anatomy of a Murder" – Lawyer-ing The Tone

I’ve seen a lot of James Stewart over the course of watching the IMDB 250 list.  For me, he’s at his best when he has a sinister touch about him, most notably under the direction of Hitchcock.  Left to himself he has a tendency to drift into aw-shucks American apple pie territory.  The combination of Stewart and Frank “Capra-corn” Capra is a particularly sickly mix.  Anatomy of a Murder is on the edgier side of his performances under the direction of Otto Preminger, but there are some cheesy moments, particularly at the beginning while the Stewart’s character Paul Biegler is established (a district attorney who’s lost his post at re-election).

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Jazz-loving Biegler is shown at a loose end at the beginning, drinking on his own and spending his days fishing and playing the piano.  His fridge full of newspaper-wrapped fish is a decent visual metaphor for his unfocused ingenuity but hardly a realistic one.  It would get pretty stinky in there after a few days.  Biegler’s alcoholic Irish lawyer friend, Parnell McCarthy (played by Arthur O’Connell) is able to stop his heavy spirit drinking like turning off a light switch in order to assist with a new case.

These gripes might seem minor but the strength of this film is in the main courtroom story which was based on a novel written by a lawyer in a real-life case that closely mirrored the characters and ploy of the film.  The power of a narrative based closely on real-life events makes the usual Hollywood blather and bullshit of the fictionalized character-establishing scenes at the start even more unsatisfying than usual.

This is a long film but it never drags thanks to Preminger's skillful direction, the power of the underlying real-life narrative and the strength of the supporting actors.  A husband is on trial for murder after shooting a local barman who his wife says raped her.  We never know for sure whether the wife was raped, what really went on between the husband and wife at the time of the events, or what the true mental state of the husband was.  (The defence is based on short-term insanity.)  There are twists and turns but not in the expected way of revealing more of what happened on the night of the shooting.  Instead the focus is on Biegler’s legal case.  The twists and turns relate to his ability to persuade the judge that by law his client should be found not guilty.  They have nothing to do with his client’s innocence or guilt of the crime.

The result is a deliberately cynical view of the trial process and of the ability of lawyers to influence the outcome by manipulating the jury, the judge and the legal framework with only a glancing engagement with the crime.  This is one area where the film is forced to skirt around conventional Hollywood plot devices.  Stewart’s character is attracted to the young manager at the murdered man’s bar, who turns out to be the daughter of the murdered man, born out of wedlock (re-enforcing the barman’s reputation as a ladies’ man).  But he can’t get romantically involved with her – it would be too messy since he has coached the killer of her father into a dodgy insanity defence.  At the end of the film when the accused husband and his wife abscond without paying his fee, Stewart’s character cheerfully shrugs it off, despite retrospective evidence that the husband is a wrong’un – a heavy drinker, some further slight evidence of being a wife-beater, skipping his fee, and a litter-lout to boot.

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"Moons, trees, leaves... fabulous!" Linda Matson 

There is surprisingly frank discussion about the alleged rape and the sexual habits of the wife for a 1959 film.  She is slut-shamed in court by the big-town lawyer for the prosecution (played with impressive presence by George C. Scott) and the word ‘slut’ is used in the dialogue.  The film goes further, however, and effectively slut-shames the wife itself.  She is shown flirting with Stewart’s character as well as with army officers at a bar while the trial is in progress.  She even casts a meaningful look at the battered old alcoholic, McCarthy.

A real strength of the film is its refusal to indulge in flashbacks.  We don’t see a single reconstruction of the night of the murder, let alone – heaven forbid – a series of evolving flashbacks as more knowledge of the night is fed in.  It is only too easy to imagine a weaker director doing this but the result would be to deflate the ambiguity about the events of that night and detract from the real unfolding drama, which is the journey of the legal arguments in the courtroom.  Similarly, we never see the murdered barman to judge what sort a womanizer he might have been, although we see photographs of him.

I wanted to give this film a 9 or 10 score but wondered whether some of the cheesier sections at the start would force it down to an 8.  (There are also a couple of rather heavy-handed asides in the courtroom to tell the audience what we already know.)  But in the end I stuck to my guns because there are so many moments of original genius here that I’ve never seen done so effectively in any other courtroom film.

Personal Score: 9/10

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This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

Franklin J. Schaffner's "Patton" – Superstar DJ

Another week, another near-three-hour war film.  After All Quiet on the Western Front, we have switched from WWI to WWII with Franklin J. Schaffner’s 1970 portrait of American general, George S. Patton.  The stalemate of WWI trench warfare has been freed up by the development of military technology, primarily highly capable air cover and tanks.  This produces a paradox for artists since on the one hand the new military technology utterly crushes the human scale, so human suffering is as high or worse than it ever was.  Yet the ability of the planes and tanks to smash through the stasis of trenches also allows authors and directors to focus on stories of daring war valour at the expense of the suffering of the ordinary soldiers.  The popular art of WWI was its poetry.  The popular art of WWII was daring hero films, a tendency only reinforced by the presence of a clear evil on the part of the Nazis.  Perhaps it was the painters who took forward the human horror of WWII most effectively.

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Patton reflects these trends as much as any traditional WWII film of valour and daring against a clearly evil enemy.  What lifts it above the average is a clever script co-written by Francis Ford Coppola and the direction of Franklin J. Schaffner, who generates excitement and tension through many beautifully shot scenes.  The scene where Patton and his commanders first spot German tanks approaching their position, for example, gives a real thrill.

It’s hard to know sometimes how much the film is taking the piss out of the egotistical gung ho Patton.  This may be the result of having separate authors contributing to the script.  What are we to make of the famous opening speech, for example, based on actual lines from the historical Patton but stitched together to produce a unique piece of art.  Some of the lines fall out harder than the bombs we see in the battle scenes.

“Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost, and will never lose a war... because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.”

Surely there is some irony in the selection of these lines – but then the Vietnam War wasn’t lost in 1970 and apparently Richard Nixon used to watch Patton while driving the remainder of the Vietnam war.  These are the ways that films can spill out of their boundaries into real life.

Another reason for suspecting irony is that George C. Scott played an out-and-out satirical part of a bullish American general is Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 cold war film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.  It’s hard not to see the spirit of General 'Buck' Turgidson seeping into Scott’s portrayal of Patton even though Scott explicitly avoided a direct comparison.

Review continues below...

Inspire your baby with the Visual Baby series of picture ebooks.  Original patterns and art designed for young eyes. Try them today by clicking the covers below.

      

"It's the only thing that stops her crying" Katie Alison

"All three of my children love this book"  Janice Peterson

"Moons, trees, leaves... fabulous!" Linda Matson 

The messy complexity of the film’s production is summed up by this quote from Scott, reproduced in Lawrence H. Suid's book "Guts and Glory": "I simply refused to play George Patton as the standard cliche you could get from newspaper clips of the time. I didn't want to play him as a hero just to please the Pentagon, and I didn't want to play him as an obvious, gung ho bully either.  I wanted to play every conceivable facet of the man."

The idea of superstar generals ruling the battlefield with their genius comes across strongly in Patton, with the Nazis shown as being scared of him and a similar mixture of fear and respect being shown to Rommel by the Allies.  But if there’s one message that any reader of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” takes away, it is that this idea of military men controlling a battle like a game of chess is an illusion and that the reality is that they are subject to chance just as much as the soldiers caught in the chaos of battle.

To take one example from this film, Patton gets his men to make a long winter journey in just two days to break a siege.  But without air support their campaign is unlikely to be successful and the weather is stopping the planes from flying.  So he asks for a weather prayer to be written.  And after reading the prayer, the next day there are clear skies and the planes can fly.  Let’s imagine for a moment that the clear skies were the result of chance rather than the prayer.  In that case, if the cloud had remained, Patton’s exhausted men would probably have been taken apart by the Germans and the siege would not have been broken.  You might say that great leaders create their own good luck but Tolstoy was fundamentally right about this point, I think, and it undermines the narrative of great warriors like Patton striding across the pages of history.

Personal Score: 8/10

Follow @MichaelHardach

This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.