Spartacus

SPARTACUS              C+                  

USA  (184 mi)  1960  ‘Scope  d:  Stanley Kubrick    uncredited director:  Anthony Mann  1967 re-release (161 mi)     1991 Restored version (197 mi)

The only Kubrick film that disappoints, as it was after this film, which Stanley Kubrick thought was a personal disaster, that he left the United States and took up permanent residence in Hertfordshire north of London in England.  It remains the only film directed by Kubrick where he did not have complete artistic control.  While Kubrick disowned the film and did not include it as part of his own original work, it grossed $60 million dollars for a $12 million dollar picture (one of the costliest movies of its era), becoming the biggest moneymaking hit in Universal Studio history until surpassed by AIRPORT (1970), and remains the third highest grossing Kubrick picture after 2001:  A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), nearly $200 million, and EYES WIDE SHUT (1999) at $160 million.  According to Kubrick afterwards, “Then I did Spartacus, which was the only film that I did not have control over, and which I feel was not enhanced by that fact.  It all really just came down to the fact that there are thousands of decisions that have to be made, and that if you don’t make them yourself, and if you’re not on the same wavelength as the people who are making them, it becomes a very painful experience, which it was.”  Biblical epics, also known as sword and sandal movies, were extremely popular in the 50’s, including Mervyn LeRoy’s QUO VADIS (1951), which includes uncredited direction from Anthony Mann, Henry Koster’s THE ROBE (1953), Cecil B. DeMille’s THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (1956), and William Wyler’s BEN-HUR (1959), which went on to win 11 Academy Awards.  SPARTACUS came about largely from Wyler’s refusal to hire Kirk Douglas in the title role, a part he passionately craved, hiring Charlton Heston instead as the noble hero, while offering Douglas the role of the villainous enemy Messala, a part he refused, instead forming his own production company to make his own Roman epic, admitting “That was what spurred me to do it, in a childish way—the ‘I’ll-show-them’ sort of thing.”  Initially turned down by David Lean, veteran director Anthony Mann, best known for his tense, psychological westerns like Winchester '73 (1950), The Naked Spur (1953), and Man of the West (1958), but also noir films like T-MEN (1947), RAW DEAL (1948), and Side Street (1950), a man with a predilection for shooting outdoors, was hired for the film.  Supposedly after shooting the opening quarry sequence of slaves crushing rocks under the brutal hot sun while under the whip of Roman guards, filmed in Death Valley, Nevada, Douglas fired him, citing artistic differences during the shooting of scenes at the gladiator school, hiring the young 31-year old Stanley Kubrick to take over, a director he had worked with previously in PATHS OF GLORY (1957).  To show how quickly this came about, Mann was fired on Friday, Kubrick read the script over the weekend, and was called in to begin shooting on Monday.

A Biblical epic with no religious overtones, the film about an early Roman slave revolt was based on the 1951 novel by Howard Fast, a former communist who began writing it as a reaction to his own imprisonment during the era of McCarthyism and Hollywood blacklisting, where he was imprisoned for 3-months for contempt of Congress after refusing to disclose the names of contributors to fund a home for orphans of American veterans of the Spanish Civil War.  While Douglas optioned the book, he also took on the dual responsibilities of executive producer and star of the film.  Ironically, after receiving 60 pages of script from Fast, Douglas turned to another blacklisted writer, Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten who defied the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 and was sentenced to a year in jail for refusing to cooperate.  After a decade of writing scripts under pseudonyms, Douglas helped destroy the Hollywood blacklist by using Trumbo’s own name in the credits.  There are interesting parallels with the McCarthy Hearings demanding witnesses “name names” of supposed communist sympathizers and a climactic scene near the end of the film after the revolt is crushed, where the tyrannical Roman General Crassus demands the captured slaves identify their leader, where each one stands up and proclaims “I am Spartacus,” leading Crassus to make the ominous proclamation, “In every city and province, lists of the disloyal have been compiled,” where every one on the list is cruelly put to death.  Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper denounced the film, claiming “The story was sold to Universal from a book written by a commie and the screen script was written by a commie, so don’t go to see it.”  Apparently nobody listened.  This is truly a Hollywood spectacle, with 10,000 extras used in the climactic battle sequence between slaves and Roman legions, but much of the film has little or no dialogue (where Kubrick reported having the most artistic freedom), accentuating the visual composition, often featuring the grandeur of an immense landscape, much of which were painted sets used as backdrops.  While the opening shots of the final battle sequence between Spartacus’s army of slaves and the geometrically arranged Roman army were actually shot in Madrid with Kubrick directing the armies from the top of specially constructed towers, the battle sequences were shot on a Hollywood soundstage, where the vast visual design recalls similar uses of perfectly choreographed battle formations set in giant landscapes from Miklós Jancscó’s THE RED AND THE WHITE (1967) and Kurosawa’s RAN (1985).  This was Kubrick’s first film in color and the first shot in widescreen, using 35 mm Super 70 Technirama which was then blown up to 70 mm film.  The cinematographer Russell Metty often complained about Kubrick’s unusually precise and detailed instructions for the film’s camerawork, but never complained about winning the Oscar for Best Cinematography. 

Despite hiring a visionary director like Kubrick, he was little more than a hired hand, unfortunately straddled by the suffocating restrictions of the era, where the film is basically a traditional “sword and sandal” costume drama with little or no character development, accentuating the heroic nature of the noble hero Spartacus (Kirk Douglas), while all the other Roman characters couldn’t be more despicable in their plotting attempts to continually manipulate and outmaneuver others for power or money.  According to Kubrick, the film “had everything but a good story,” as there’s a lack of identification with anyone onscreen, where Kubrick complained the character of Spartacus was depicted as a saint, with no human faults, which has a way of dating the film, unlike the timelessness of Kubrick’s other films, but this was the typical Hollywood formula that continued unabated throughout the 50’s and 60’s until they broke the bank with CLEOPATRA (1963), where by the end of the decade studios had completely lost their autocratic power.  Kubrick distanced himself from the film afterwards, continually at odds with the writer Trumbo over conflicting visions, where the working relationship with Douglas soured as well.  Douglas notes in his autobiography, “You can be a shit and be talented and, conversely, you can be the nicest guy in the world and not have any talent.  Stanley Kubrick is a talented shit.”  Despite all the troubles on the set, SPARTACUS was a critical and commercial success, winning four Academy Awards, and established Kubrick as a director of note, though many of the violent battle scenes were eventually cut due to negative audience reactions at preview screenings.  Also excluded in the original release was a bath scene (filmed at William Randolph Hearst’s San Simeon estate) where Roman general Crassus (Laurence Olivier) attempts to seduce his slave Antoninus (Tony Curtis with his completely out of place Brooklyn accent), claiming sexual preference is all a matter of taste, like “eating oysters” or “eating snails,” rather than a reflection of morality.  The film was re-released in 1967 in a version 23-minutes shorter, and again in 1991 with the same 23-minutes restored while also adding an additional 14-minutes cut from the original release.  Due to the death of Olivier two years earlier, when the film was restored in 1991, the original audio recording of the bath scene was missing, so it had to be redubbed by Tony Curtis, and with the permission of Olivier’s widow, actress Joan Plowright, she recommended Anthony Hopkins, a protégé of Olivier from the Royal National Theater, to impersonate Olivier’s voice in the scene.  Also missing is a scene where Roman Senator Gracchus (Charles Laughton) commits suicide, though the act is certainly implied due to the dramatic power shift.  

It was actually during the making of this movie that Kubrick discovered a preference for filming in the controlled environment of a studio, as there were fewer outside distractions or acts of nature to contend with, believing actors could better concentrate working on a sound stage.  Douglas assembled a powerful cast, starting with Laurence Olivier, who read the book and felt he’d be perfect playing the part of Spartacus, then afterwards suggested he’d consider the part of Crassus if it was improved upon.  Laurence Olivier playing one of the first bisexual characters in a major Hollywood film, you’d think this would be noteworthy, but according to Douglas, the scene was “very subtle, nothing explicit.  The censors weren’t sure it was about homosexuality, but just in case they wanted it out.”  Douglas fought for the scene, claiming it was significant because it “showed another way the Romans abused the slaves.”  For the role of Varinia, Spartacus’s love interest, initially the role was given to German actress Sabina Bethmann, but once shooting got underway, it was decided she was not right for the part, so Douglas quickly replaced her with Jean Simmons, who had just finished shooting ELMER GANTRY (1960), eventually marrying the director Richard Brooks.  Peter Ustinov quickly signed on as Batiatus, a major slave trader and the operator of the gladiator training school, winning the Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor, but it was harder to convince Charles Laughton, who took one look at the script and reportedly uttered, “Really, a piece of shit.”  In the end he took the role as he needed the money, earning $41,000 for 13 days of shooting that he claimed was far from a pleasant experience, though Laughton stole most every scene he was in.  Rounding out the cast was Woody Strode, part of the John Ford stable of actors who played one of the strongest gladiators, matching Douglas blow for blow in the ring, among the better scenes in the film, becoming the spark that led the slave revolt at the training camp in Capua, quickly overrunning the guards, leading to an uprising that soon spread across the Italian Peninsula freeing tens of thousands of slaves, expressed as a utopian vision of freedom, where they quickly overrun the initial Roman army dispatched to rout them, causing a great deal of embarrassment and dissatisfaction in the Roman Senate, where John Gavin as Julius Caesar is promoted as Commander of the garrison of Rome, while General Crassus and his own army takes it upon himself to quell the rebellion. 

The historical era of the slave revolt was the two year period from 73 – 71 B.C., a time when slavery accounted for roughly every third person in Italy, where Spartacus and his ragtag army that included the elderly, women and children, actually defeated the Roman army on several occasions, even threatening Rome itself, eventually hoping to escape through the purchase of pirate ships awaiting them in the Eastern seaport of Brundisium, where the slaves could return to the lands of their origins where they had originally been sold to the Romans.  In the film Spartacus improbably announces their intentions, disclosing the exact location where they are heading, all but guaranteeing a massive Roman army would be there waiting for them.  While this strategy appears doomed from the outset, had they not been double crossed by Crassus, the ships bought out from underneath them, they might have gotten away with it.  Instead, after a long march to the sea, they have to turn and face the enemy, unwittingly moving his forces into a historical trap that the Romans were well acquainted with, having the time to bring in legions of troops from abroad, leaving Spartacus pinned between armies in what turns into a gory spectacle with tens of thousands slaughtered and a few thousand survivors left for capture.  When they refuse to identify which one is their leader Spartacus in exchange for leniency, Crassus decrees they all forfeit their right to live, stringing up all 6000 of his followers along with Spartacus on wooden crosses where they are crucified along the Appian Way, a 120 mile corridor between Capua and Rome.  For Trumbo, the barely hidden allegory of Joseph McCarthy’s fascist destruction of left-wing dissent in the 50’s was paramount, where the scene was meant to dramatize the solidarity of those accused of being Communist sympathizers during the McCarthy Era, glorifying the heroism of those who refused to implicate others, but there’s little evidence Kubrick held similar interests or motivation.  There’s no hint of any revolutionary spirit, or any sense of sacrifice for a greater good, instead there is a rush to doom where each one is left to an inglorious fate, dying an agonizing death, left isolated and alone, where they end up pawns in somebody else’s game.  Like most costume dramas, especially one based in antiquity, actors rarely give their best performances as they tend to overact and overdramatize, where the human element along with subtlety is diminished in order to emphasize the dazzling spectacle and pageantry.  Kubrick remedied that situation when he made his own historical costume drama, BARRY LYNDON (1975), one of the most ravishingly beautiful films ever made, where the contemplative pace balanced with plenty of sardonic wit and humor on display are a welcome change to these dreadfully pompous Hollywood presentations, where Kubrick’s later film is an advanced experiment in cinematic structure and design, one of his most worthy masterpieces. 

Wolfschildren (Wolfskinder)

WOLFSCHILDREN (Wolfskinder)        B     
Germany  (90 mi)  2013  ‘Scope  d:  Rick Ostermann      Website

Unlike most war stories, this one actually takes place after the war is over, in 1946-47 when orphaned German children separated from their families attempted to make arduous journeys through Russian occupied territory across Poland into Lithuania in hopes that distant relatives or friends might take them in.  Written by the director, the story is inspired by true events occurring within his own family, where many who successfully traveled to Lithuania were secretly forced to work for farmers in exchange for food.  While it’s unfortunate the film comes on the heels of Cate Shortland’s Lore (2012), an exquisite film that probes more deeply into the question of the heavily stigmatized psychological shame of German defeat, it should also be pointed out that some 12 to 14 million German people living in German occupied territories during the war had to be transported back to Germany, becoming the largest transfer of any population in modern European history.  It was this group, mostly women and children, which were the most severely mistreated before they were ultimately transported back to Germany.  Thousands died in forced labor camps, millions died of hunger and deprivation, while as many as 2 million women and girls were raped by members of the Soviet Red Army, some as many as 60 or 70 times.  Ostermann’s film, on the other hand, bears some similarity to Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955), told almost exclusively through a collective children’s point of view, having to make their way through a military occupation where they were continually forced to outrun and escape from uniformed men with rifles and guns, while also lingering in those quiet moments lying in the high grass, or next to a tranquil lake, where in contrast to terror and fear, the pastoral beauty evokes a transcendent harmony or peace.  

14-year old Hans (Levin Liam) and his 9-year old younger brother Fritz (Patrick Lorenczat) are forced to repeat their names in front of their mother moments before she dies of starvation, a reminder of who they are, insisting they don’t forget as she sends them on a harrowing journey to a Lithuanian farm where they once stayed.  Also she makes Hans promise to take care of his younger brother to insure they don’t get separated, where at night he reads out of geography book an original description of what appears to be the initial discovery of the Galapagos Islands, describing how different species of turtles can be traced back to specific islands, where this peaceful narration of natural harmony is interspersed between signs of death and deprivation.  Almost immediately, under attack from Red Army gunfire, the brothers get separated attempting to cross a river, where Hans ends up with a young girl his own age, the overly maternal Christel (Helena Phil), and two younger kids under her care.  While they flee to safety, Hans is tormented by losing his brother, but in no time that guilt is replaced by hunger, thirst, and exhaustion, where they’re forced to travel off road as much as possible, which slows down their pace to a near crawl.  When one of the younger kids gets bitten by a dog and needs medical care, they have no choice but to entrust him into the care of the local adults that do pass by on the road.  He’s soon replaced by another kid Paul (Til-Niklas Theinert) wearing no shoes, with Hans carrying him on his back for most of the duration, looking after him much as he would his own brother.  These small uprooted groups of wandering children were called wolf children.    

There is no sense of time on this journey, as months and even years may pass, but what’s eerie is how the accumulated numbers slowly diminish, where kids like Fritz often disappear without a trace, getting killed, sick, kidnapped by the army, or simply disappear mysteriously, where the group can’t linger behind and figure it out, but must push ahead.  One other observation is how kindly adults help these kids out, though some may extract a form of payment in return, such as taking a child’s doll away from them in exchange for food or safety.  But the grim reality is a nightmarish odyssey of brutality, starvation, and death, where these kids repeatedly witness traces of the dead, the theft and slaughter of a farmer’s livestock, and the brutalizing of women, where Christel’s maternal generosity soon becomes laced with a paranoiac fear, where every man becomes a threat to her.  Intermixed with the child horrors are solitary moments of quiet and peace, where the cinematography by Leah Striker reflects the kind of world Hans reads about in his book, where he curiously observes frogs, lizards, and grasshoppers along the way, while moments later he’s racing for safety.  The continually changing environment offers new challenges, where the kids are surprisingly resilient and adaptive, and often choose to disappear with a helpful adult, while the others stay together.  In the end, however, Hans ends up fending off dangers on his own, where he’s not the same kid that set out on this journey, but he’s alive.  Given the amount of time the kids wander through dense woodland forest, there’s a mythical element of the inherent danger of Hansel and Gretel, especially every time they come upon a home where some new evil seems to await them in this often beautiful but overly dour recollection of postwar atrocities.

The Night of the Hunter

THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER     A            

USA  (93 mi)  1955  d:  Charles Laughton

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits.

—Matthew 7:15-16

A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

—Matthew 7:18, 20, The Reverend Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum’s) ominous introduction

But there are things you hate, Lord, perfume-smellin' things, lacy things, things with curly hair.

—The Reverend Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum)

This is another film that when released in 1955, it was maligned as hopelessly out of synch with American postwar sensibilities and was yet another film that failed at the box office, which so disappointed the director he never made another film, yet remains one of the greatest American films ever made.  The film is based on the novel of the same name by Davis Grubb, adapted for the screen by James Agee, who had a severe drinking problem and died the year the film was released, so the director finished the script, though it largely coincides with Agee’s first draft.  Unlike the uproar with the publishing of Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry (1927), which took satirical swipes at attitudes within evangelical circles in the 1920’s, denounced from pulpits across the country, where the city of Boston banned the book, this novel was based on the true story of Harry Powers, who was hanged in 1932 for the murders of two widows and three children in Clarksburg, West Virginia. Using a hybrid of different styles, the film is something of an oddity, using a German Expressionist lighting design, gorgeously filmed by Stanley Cortez, honored for his deep focus cinematography in THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (1942), but also the manner of a Brothers Grimm children’s story, using elaborate artificialized visual fantasy with a seething undercurrent of social malaise hovering underneath.  Despite the fairy tale element, this veers into film noir territory, expressing cynical attitudes and deeply repressed sexual motivations, where God (who is spoken to directly) is literally seen as a tolerant accomplice to murder:  “Not that you mind the killings! There's plenty of killings in your book, Lord.”  Easily the most outstanding aspect is a brilliantly evil performance by Robert Mitchum as the Reverend Harry Powell (who as it turns out, directed the children scenes, as Laughton had little affection for them), a psychopathic preacher (needing no make-up) that kills unsuspecting widows for their money, who spends the film on a relentless search for hidden money that he knows is in the hands of two children, ten-year old John (Billy Chapin) and his younger sister Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce).   

So while this is a murder mystery about a serial killer on the loose, it’s simultaneously a nightmarish child horror story seen through the eyes of the children, given a strange Biblical context, including repeating refrains from a familiar hymn “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” first heard here The Night of the Hunter: The Showalter Hymn, when it is first YouTube (1:26).  Mitchum’s baritone voice was never used to better effect, and while the hymn is a song of reassurance and faith, here it is continually used to announce his menacing presence.  Set in the rural Bible belt during the Depression, Ben Harper (Peter Graves) robs a bank stealing $10,000, quickly giving it to his two young children to hide before he is arrested and hauled off to jail, but not before forcing them both to swear not to tell anyone, not even their mother.  Sharing the same prison cell, the Preacher (arrested on car theft) overhears him talk in his sleep about hidden money, which may as well be the voice of God speaking.  After Harper is executed, the Preacher, with his fire and brimstone drawl, dressed in a cleric’s black cloth and a wide brim puritan hat, pays a visit to the grieving widow Willa, Shelley Winters, who is surrounded by her overly pious community, especially Mrs. Spoon (Evelyn Varden), who keeps her nose in everybody’s business.  While the entire community is smitten with the young Preacher, it’s Mrs. Spoon (an anonymous presence of Evil hidden within the flock of Christian sheep, who can later be seen leading a lynch mob against him!) who gushes over his presence and all but throws Wilma at his feet in marriage, though John keeps a healthy distance and has his suspicions, as all this Preacher keeps asking him about is the money.  No one believes John, however, as the Preacher has everyone convinced the money was thrown in a river, especially his mother, though he keeps tightening the screws on John, especially when he terrorizes him with the thought of becoming his new father through marriage, a man with the words “love” and hate” tattooed on the knuckles of each hand, seen here:  Love - Hate: Night of the Hunter - YouTube (57 seconds), turned into a freakish circus performance told in the form of a Biblical parable. 

Wilma’s wedding night is a thing for the ages, as Powell is not interested in sex, only wallowing in all the as yet undiscovered money, where the naively eager expectant bride is belittled and humiliated to discover the puritanical wrath of God coming down upon her in the form of her new tyrannical husband who lays down the law that sex is only for procreation.  As if under the spell of his personal magnetism, we see her next sweating profusely, framed by burning torches at a revival meeting, confessing her wedding night sinful expectations as a means to arouse the crowd into a virtuous frenzy. But when she overhears the Preacher’s sinister threats to her son, this leads to a maniacally crazed ritual where her soft narration of receiving God’s salvation results in a baptism of the barbaric and the grotesque The Night Of The Hunter - Wife Killer  YouTube (2:11), leaving her at the bottom of the river.  With no one left to protect them, the children are finally at the Preacher’s mercy.  Realizing his murderous intentions, they slip away into the night and escape in a raft down the river, producing some of the most extraordinary images of the film, abandoning all pretense at realism and embracing the children’s point of view, almost like turning the pages of a child’s picture book.  The artificiality of these river sequences is dazzling, often resembling a Huckleberry Finn wonderland, where Mitchum’s foreboding presence follows them everywhere, seen on the distant horizon riding a horse.  But the real surprise is yet to come, where Laughton picks silent film goddess Lillian Gish from the D.W. Griffith era to sweep the kids up in her arms and take them into her protective custody, as she has several other abandoned young children as well, which changes the entire tone of the film.  Rooted in a strong faith in The Bible, often telling them stories, Gish as the counter opposite to Mitchum couldn’t be more intriguing, a hard-nosed woman who practices tough love.  When the inevitable occurs and the Preacher comes for the children, she knows a fraud when she sees one, leading to a delicious Good/Evil co-mingling refrain of the hymn, where Gish, rifle in hand, joins along, but includes what the Preacher leaves out, the lyric reference to “Jesus” Robert Mitchum - The Night of the Hunter - "Leaning" - YouTube  (2:12).  All set in a weird, exquisitely beautiful and eerie atmosphere that feels timeless, not at all reminiscent of the 50’s, where the subversive nature of the film recalls Douglas Sirk, this is a truly exquisite allegory of innocence, evil, and hypocrisy, selected to the Library of Congress National Film Registry as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant,” certainly influencing later directors like Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, David Lynch, and the Coen Brothers.