{"id":286,"date":"2013-03-01T12:28:12","date_gmt":"2013-03-01T17:28:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tr10023.com\/?p=286"},"modified":"2013-10-18T11:51:41","modified_gmt":"2013-10-18T15:51:41","slug":"kubrickdouglas-spartacus-on-dvd-criterion-collection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.tr10023.com\/?p=286","title":{"rendered":"Kubrick\/Douglas ‘Spartacus’ on DVD — Criterion Collection"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Kirk<\/a>

Kirk Douglas as the revolting slave.<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n

Unlike its creators, “Spartacus” (Universal, 1960) is aging gracefully.\u00a0 Lighter on its feet than most epics of comparable size and length, refreshingly unencumbered by Tinseltown piety (the story ends about 71 years before the birth of Jesus), and painstakingly restored, it\u2019s better than ever.\u00a0 If nothing in it approaches the thrilling chariot race from “Ben Hur” or the ostentatious spectacle of Elizabeth Taylor\u2019s Cleopatra barging through the streets of Rome, it is more consistently entertaining than those two swollen meditations on the classical world.<\/p>\n

The story of a slave rebellion that shook the Roman republic to its foundations presents an unusually ripe opportunity for fatuous moralizing, especially when it is told by men who had only recently emerged from prison after refusing to help their government oppress its citizenry.\u00a0 Yet “Spartacus” wastes little breath speechifying against indefensible forms of tyranny.\u00a0 For this reason, Dalton Trumbo\u2019s screenplay (from Howard Fast\u2019s novel), may seem merely workmanlike at first hearing.\u00a0 But it\u2019s better than that:\u00a0 if it hasn\u2019t the facile cleverness of Robert Bolt\u2019s “Lawrence of Arabia,” at least it is free of Bolt\u2019s maddening pretentiousness; Trumbo doesn\u2019t wrap platitudes in epigrams and present them as if they were The Wisdom of the Ages.<\/p>\n

With his hair cut en brosse<\/i>, Kirk Douglas<\/a> looks little like my idea of a Thracian bondsman, but he sure looks great in his various gunnysack ensembles<\/i>; he looks even better as a gladiator, when he wears only a burlap diaper and pull-tab galerus (mail shoulder guard).\u00a0 He\u2019s incredibly photogenic\u2014all sharp angles and muscularity, glistening under a fetching coat of oil.\u00a0 An actor of extremely limited resources\u2014an adherent of the Don\u2019t-Force-It-Get-A-Bigger-Hammer school of acting\u2014he indicates a narrow range of emotions with terrific energy.\u00a0 What he lacks in breadth and depth, he attempts to make up for in brute force.\u00a0 He adopts a generalized mood for each scene, and then proceeds to act out isolated words, as if they had no connection to the scene as a whole.\u00a0 His acting is an odd combination of crude pantomime and over-emphatic speech, as if he were playing charades and Password at the same time.\u00a0 He\u2019s at his worst when a scene requires him to appear to be lost in thought; he can\u2019t do it without pulling cartoon faces.\u00a0 Only Joan Crawford pantomimed the act of thought with such hilarious ineptitude.\u00a0 Early in the picture, Douglas shares a scene with Woody Strode; in a few minutes they will fight to the death in the arena.<\/p>\n

\"Woody<\/a>

Woody Strode: Silentium est aureum.<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n

Douglas brays and roars and stamps about, while Strode moves not a muscle and silently acts him off the screen.\u00a0 So does everyone else in the picture, for that matter\u2014Douglas is easily the worst actor in it (even Tony Curtis, as duh Singguh rof Soanggs, is better), but his energy and commitment to the material go a long way to mitigating his shortcomings.<\/p>\n

\"Olivier<\/a>

Olivier and Curtis: Curtis called this scene “Rub-a-dub-dub, Two men in a tub.” Anthony Hopkins dubbed in Olivier’s voice, which was lost after this scene was cut.<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n

The DVD is chiefly recommended for the hilariously scabrous commentary by Douglas, Fast, Peter Ustinov and a few others.\u00a0 The movie was difficult to make and many big egos were bruised in the process.\u00a0 Now many of those old wounds are revisited by the people who inflicted them and the ones who still nurse them.\u00a0 The combination of self-serving reminiscence, egomania, wounded pride and extreme old age makes some of the commentary sound like “The Sunshine Boys.”<\/p>\n

Fast, still bitter over his dismissal as screenwriter, unable to disguise either his feelings or his motives, is perhaps the funniest\u2014the embodiment of a peevish old coot.\u00a0 At first, weary pessimism checks his chagrin.\u00a0 But before long, Dalton Trumbo\u2019s observations awaken his rancor, and the first sight of Kirk Douglas turns the old boy into Yosemite Sam.\u00a0 From then on, Fast\u2019s commentary is a nearly unbroken stream of abuse:\u00a0 scorn pours from him in a feeble voice that trembles with decrepitude and dismay.<\/p>\n

\"Howard<\/a>

Howard Fast: Red as the ‘Daily Worker’ and twice as sore.<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n

Douglas (who also produced the picture) defends himself with his own brand of demented indignation, sometimes assuming a crude display of injured innocence, other times affecting a condescending compassion for Fast, whose reason (Douglas implies) has been beguiled by paranoia.\u00a0 Fast sounds like a sorehead, but Douglas sounds entirely self-serving and not (ahem) perfectly truthful.\u00a0 He\u2019s a lousy actor, and a worse commentator.\u00a0 Sadly, his commentary must have been recorded shortly after his stroke, and his diction bears its ravages, lending poignancy to his self-defense.<\/p>\n

Both Douglas and Fast have compelling reasons to dislike each other; they both appear to be constitutionally incapable of collaborating or embracing a point of view not entirely their own.\u00a0 It\u2019s not that they\u2019re willfully dishonest, however:\u00a0 they simply can\u2019t be trusted to remember things accurately. \u00a0Both are highly excitable, passionate, strong-willed men\u2014and completely unable to pretend an objectivity that they don\u2019t have.\u00a0 They can\u2019t tell a story that makes them look bad.\u00a0 For all these reasons, they\u2019re unreliable commentators and they cancel each other out.<\/p>\n

It was a brutal set to work on:\u00a0 the all-star cast was a rogues’ gallery of scene-stealers, egomaniacs and intriguers, each plotting to pull focus and winkle screen time away from his co-stars, each seeming to forget that the star was also the producer with the final cut.\u00a0 True to form, Douglas cut the film to the contours of his ego, and thereby brought all the supporting cast\u2019s jiggery pokery to naught\u2014with the notable exception of Peter Ustinov (prominently featured on the commentary track), who succeeded in getting his own way in everything.\u00a0 While the others were busily planting knives in each others\u2019 backs, Ustinov cozied up to the boss.\u00a0 At once self-deprecating and self-serving\u2014Uriah Heep with adipose\u2014he buffaloed everyone, including Fast and Douglas, who granted him permission to write his own lines (and to \u201ctighten\u201d Charles Laughton\u2019s).<\/p>\n

\"Charles<\/a>

Charles Laughton speaks lines ‘tightened’ by Ustinov.<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n

Speaking his own brittle aphorisms and blinking his piggy eyes appreciatively at the cleverness of his droll ironies, Ustinov gives his usual ham performance\u2014busy-busy-busy, cartoonish and irrelevant\u2014he\u2019s like one of those \u00a0<\/i>“Fantasia”\u00a0hippopotami skittering about en pointe<\/i>.\u00a0 Onscreen, his tiny eyes glitter with self-congratulation as he pulls focus, while on the commentary track, speaking with the lofty hauteur of an aristocrat, he treats most of his fellow actors as so much dust under his chariot wheels.\u00a0 But for all his pretentions, he\u2019s a low comedian with plummy overtones\u2014he acts up a storm all by himself, and clutters every line with extraneous business.\u00a0 One hot afternoon late in the shooting, Laurence Olivier, saddle sore and broiling inside his heavy armor, finally lost patience with Ustinov\u2019s scene-stealing monkeyshines.\u00a0 Olivier cantered up to him, leant down and said, in a quiet voice with murder in it, \u201cDear boy, could you perhaps . . . do less<\/em>?\u201d\u00a0 Ustinov eventually won an Oscar for his sins, but nursed a grudge against Olivier for the rest of his life.\u00a0 Though he doesn\u2019t mention the incident in his commentary, he makes casually cruel remarks about Olivier whenever he mentions him \u2014 and has the effrontery to psychoanalyze him.\u00a0 He does, however, resist the temptation to criticize Douglas or Fast outright, choosing instead to praise them\u2014faintly\u2014and let the delicate wince in his voice do the dirty work for him.\u00a0 Ustinov has the good sense and bad manners to speak ill only of the dead.\u00a0 He\u2019s so full of himself that you can\u2019t trust a thing he says.\u00a0 But my God, how well he says it! \u00a0Taken as a display of smooth disingenuousness, or as an exercise in carefully disguised self-congratulation, Ustinov\u2019s commentary is virtuoso.\u00a0 He\u2019s an impressive and thoroughly unreliable raconteur:\u00a0 ostentatiously erudite, condescending, funny, dropping names like crazy, skewering as he praises, cringing as he swaggers.\u00a0 As a commentator, he gives the most accomplished performance of his career.<\/p>\n

Olivier’s performance in the picture is amused and amusing. \u00a0He seems to be enjoying himself, not always in a perfectly innocent way, as in the two homoerotic scenes: \u00a0one with Tony Curtis as his catamite, the other with John Gavin as Julius Caesar\/Muscle God (“Why man, he doth bestride the narrow world\/Like a Colossus!”). \u00a0Olivier can’t help leaning into him and stroking his arms with the backs of his fingers. \u00a0Gavin is stoic as a Roman and stony as the Appian Way; did he know what Larry wanted?<\/p>\n

\"Olivier<\/a>

Olivier to Gavin: ‘Dear boy, could you perhaps . . . do MORE?’<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Unlike its creators, “Spartacus” (Universal, 1960) is aging gracefully.\u00a0 Lighter on its feet than most epics of comparable size and length, refreshingly unencumbered by Tinseltown piety (the story ends about 71 years before the birth of Jesus), and painstakingly restored, it\u2019s better than ever.\u00a0 If nothing in it approaches the thrilling chariot race from “Ben […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[476,475,472,21,477,130,387,471,470,473,98,474],"class_list":["post-286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main","tag-charles-laughton","tag-dalton-trumbo","tag-howard-fast","tag-joan-crawford","tag-john-gavin","tag-kirk-douglas","tag-laurence-olivier","tag-peter-ustinov","tag-spartacus","tag-stanley-kubrick","tag-tony-curtis","tag-woody-strode"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p40pmy-4C","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tr10023.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tr10023.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tr10023.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tr10023.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tr10023.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=286"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/www.tr10023.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4373,"href":"http:\/\/www.tr10023.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286\/revisions\/4373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tr10023.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tr10023.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tr10023.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}