#81 - Spartacus

He's Spartacus. No, he's Spartacus. No, he's Spartacus.

When I was born, a nurse suggested that my parents name me Kirk because I had the chin of Kirk Douglas, the star of this movie -- cleft with a dimple. Luckily, they didn't take the advice of the nurse and gave me the name stolen from a soap opera I use today. But I still see a startling resemblance between myself and Michael Douglas's father.

Stanley Kubrick's fifth film, but his first real one, was made in 1960 and is a sprawling epic of the story of a slave who leads a revolution to topple the corrupt political leaders 100 years before Christ was born.

Douglas plays the sinewy and rebellious slave Spartacus, and Laurence Olivier plays his main enemy, Crassus. I usually don't enjoy epics that last three hours, as you may know. I find them meandering and boring. I prefer a short, simple story done well. But for some reason, I really enjoyed this movie. Perhaps it was Kubrick's eye that made it so different (although, I would not have known that Kubrick directed it without finding it out beyond the movie's credits).

As with most movies (for me at least), the beginning and the ending were interesting and even captivating, and thus made up for the middle-third slump, where it's all talking and planning and blah-blah.

The film's most famous moment comes when Crassus asks the defeated slave army which one of them is Spartacus, the leader of the rebellion. Instead of giving up their fearless leader, all of them say that they are the real Spartacus, thus ensuring that Crassus will never figure it out. But he does, and then crucifies Spartacus. What a cheery way to end the movie, I know. It's not cheerful, but it is hopeful. Spartacus's child was born a free man, and Spartacus's death suddenly seems warranted, justified, even necessary.

The film won four Academy Awards, with one being for acting. Peter Ustinov won for his supporting role of Batiatus, a broker of the slaves who steals every scene with his legitimately funny sense of humor.

All in all, the film was interesting and successful because it did not treat itself as the expensive and ambitious epic that it was. The characters and the storylines were more intimate than, say, those of "Lawrence of Arabia." Great, now I have to again purge my memory of watching that awful movie.