Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #33506 in DVD
• Released on: 2000-11-27
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Dubbed, PAL, Widescreen
• Original language: English, French
• Subtitled in: English, German, French, Portuguese, Swedish, Turkish, Danish, Hungarian, Polish, Dutch, Finnish, Czech, Bulgarian
• Dubbed in: German, Italian, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 186 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Stanley Kubrick was only 31 years old when Kirk Douglas (star of Kubrick's classic Paths of Glory) recruited the young director to pilot this epic saga, in which the rebellious slave Spartacus (played by Douglas) leads a freedom revolt against the ailing Roman Republic and its generals. Kubrick would later disown the film because it was not a personal project--he was merely a director-for-hire--but Spartacus remains one of the best of Hollywood's grand historical epics. With an intelligent screenplay by then-blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo (from a novel by Howard Fast), its liberal message of freedom and civil rights, highly relevant in early-1960s USA, is still quite powerful and the all-star cast (including Charles Laughton in full toga) is full of entertaining surprises.

Restored in 1991 to include scenes deleted from the original 1960 release, the full-length Spartacus is a grand-scale cinematic marvel, offering some of the most awesome battles ever filmed and a central performance by Douglas that's as sensitively emotional as it is intensely heroic. Jean Simmons plays the slave woman who becomes Spartacus's wife, and Peter Ustinov steals the show with his frequently hilarious, Oscar-winning performance as a slave trader who shamelessly curries favour with his Roman superiors. The restored version also includes a formerly deleted bathhouse scene in which Laurence Olivier's patrician Crassus (with restored dialogue dubbed by Anthony Hopkins) gets hot and bothered over a slave servant played by Tony Curtis. These and other restored scenes expand the film to just over three hours in length. Despite some forgivable lulls, this is a rousing and substantial drama that grabs and holds your attention. Breaking tradition with sophisticated themes and a downbeat (yet eminently noble) conclusion, Spartacus is a thinking person's epic, rising above mere spectacle with a story as impressive as its widescreen action and Oscar-winning sets. --Jeff Shannon

Video Description
DVD Special Features:

Trailer
Production notes
Cast & filmmakers' biographies
2.35:1 widescreen
Languages -- English (Dolby Digital 5.1) and French, German, Italian, Spanish (Dolby Stereo)
Subtitles -- English, French, German, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Turkish, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Portuguese, Danish, Bulgarian

Synopsis
SPARTACUS, based on Howard Fast's popular novel, is Stanley Kubrick's glorious masterpiece about a slave uprising in Rome in 70 BC. Kirk Douglas, who also served as executive producer, stars as the title character, a man born of a slave woman and a slave master who has known nothing but chains for his entire life. After being forced to put on a gladiator show--that almost leads to his death--for wealthy Romans (including a marvellously conniving Laurence Olivier as the power-hungry Crassus), Spartacus leads a slave revolt across Italy that soon has thousands marching on Rome. Meanwhile, he has fallen in love with the beautiful Varinia (an effervescent Jean Simmons), pledging his life to her.
Douglas assembled a fabulous all-star cast for the film; in addition to himself, Simmons, and Olivier, terrific performances are turned in by Charles Laughton as the curmudgeonly senator Gracchus, John Gavin (PSYCHO) as the young Julius Caesar, Tony Curtis as Antoninus (a singer of songs, with all lines delivered in a beautifully thick New York accent), and especially Peter Ustinov, an Oscar winner for his portrayal of the businessman Batiatus, who always wants to know what's in it for him. Blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo's melodramatic script and Alex North's thrilling, soaring score add a majesty that helps make SPARTACUS one of the finest costume epics to ever come out of Hollywood.

Customer Reviews

Excellent DVD
Great to see another region 2 DVD of such excellent quality. The film itself is wonderful, (see other reviews for story etc) and the picture quality superb, even has a choice of DTS sound, more of that please! Loaded with extras and a short film called the Hollywood Ten. My only gripe is that the movie has been put onto two discs, which means getting off the couch at the intermission, though it is well worth the effort. This is a definite must have for any Stanley Kubrick fan.

Do you like gladiator movies?
Currently in the United States, the USA Network is showing a remake of the story of `Spartacus', taken from the same novel text as the classic 1960 Oscar-winning film of the same subject, so I thought this might be the opportune time to look at this classic film and tale. The author of the novel, Howard Fast, was also the author of many novels-turned-films like `The Crossing', `April Morning', `Freedom Road', and `How the West was Won'. Fast passed away just last year, while the current remake of Spartacus was in production.

The original film, based as it was on Fast's novel, takes many liberties with history. The characterisations of Spartacus' early days with Varinia, for example, are mere speculation. The course of the slave-army progress through Italy is similarly an invention made for easier poetic rendering - the slave-army in fact wandered throughout Italy in a much different fashion, with different results than shown in the film. The film portrays a rather simple pattern of slaves accumulating to the slave-army in droves as they march toward a port to escape from Italy; this is much easier to portray than the actual course. What this film does not do is set the stage properly historically - this was not the first slave revolt in Roman history, and Spartacus and his band of gladiators drew strength and inspiration from the Sicilian and southern Italian revolts of the then not-too-distant past.

However, the main object of Fast's novel, and Stanley Kubrick's realisation of such in cinema, was the story of the quest for freedom against oppression and tyranny. There are echoes of the cold war here, to be sure - the autocratic Crassus threatening the freedom of a great republic is easily translated into the `Red Scare' that so many people in the West, particularly in America, perceived in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Kubrick already had a reputation as a good director, but the film `Spartacus' may be what made his reputation of being a master of the directing arts (films such as `2001: A Space Odyssey', `Clockwork Orange', and `Dr. Strangelove', a much less subtle `Red Scare' film, were all to come later). His casting decisions from the young Kirk Douglas as Spartacus to Laurence Olivier as the conniving Roman power-broker Crassus to Peter Ustinov (who was also a script-writer, uncredited) as the gladiator-school owner Lentulus are all inspired. The film was nominated for six Academy Awards, of which it won four, including a nod to Ustinov as best supporting actor. It also won the Golden Globe as best picture.

Crassus, by all historical accounts, was a schemer who wanted absolute rule in Rome. He was not the first, nor the last, but was one of the fore-runners of the Emperors who would spring from Julius Caesar's line. Crassus was for a time the wealthiest man in Rome, competing with Pompeii for power and influence. Crassus did not have the military experience Pompeii had, and so had to make up for this by crushing the slave rebellion. Olivier plays the calculating senator with grace and subtlety, but perhaps the most daring scene (on occasion omitted) was the bath scene with the mis-cast Tony Curtis, in which they speak of bisexuality and homosexuality in very oblique terms; of course such divisions of sexuality were, by many accounts, much less rigid in the past than our post-Victorian sensibility makes them out to be.

As I say, Tony Curtis seems mis-cast here as Antoninus. The `singer of songs' is an unlikely slave and unlikely leader in the army, and almost wholly an invention for dramatic device, to give Spartacus a stronger connection to Crassus and a dramatic denouement. The only primary female character in the film is Varina, superbly played by Jean Simmons, whose beauty was at its height during this time, and whose timeless voice carried much of the meaning of the slave revolt in real human emotions. The underutilised character of Draba, the African slave whose refusal to kill Spartacus in a private match staged by Lentulus, is ably played by Woody Strode, whose filmography includes an astonishing 76 films over the course of 50 years.

The staging of the film was dramatic and well-constructed; the sets were very realistic, particularly for a time before the invention of computer generated imagery. The gladiator training camp and army maneuvering showed researched into the training and tactics used in actual Roman settings, even if the blood was still a bit unrealistic by comparison to today's special effects standards. The film is in vivid technicolour, making this a real production of the `glory days' of Hollywood, where things were larger than life.

Despite ending with the crushing of the slave revolt, the whole film turns history around, as those watching will know the outcome. The freedom of Rome will itself soon come to an end, only to fall under its own weight a few centuries later. The cycle of history continues, and human freedom is something that is always to be valued, and requires the courageous and strong to work together and be willing to sacrifice - this is the moral of the story. The famous scene where all the conquered slaves stand to claim the identity of Spartacus is legendary, for good reason. Oft repeated, oft used in parody, this scene shows both the cost and value of loyalty.

Gorgeous.
I'm the type of viewer who goes through Roman epics picking out the mistakes - sad, but true. This one can certainly do with Spartacus - the mysterious name change of Marcus Publius (or vice versa) Glabrus, the oversimplification of the political situation in Rome at the time, the question of why exactly Batiatus and Verinia set off on the Via Appia at the end (which led to Brundisium) when they were meant to be going to Gaul.
Yet, having watched Spartacus at least twenty times, it's quite obvious that this film is utterly stunning in spite of its occasional minor inaccuracies. The depth and richness of detail of both sets and in the action is unparalleled in any similar epic - Batiatus extending a hand to honour the shrine of the lares in his villa; Verinia extracting grain or somesuch from containers buried in the ground of the courtyard; the superficial chatter of the Romans as the gladiators line up to die for their amusement. The small things that one only sees on the fifth or sixth viewing are the things that make Spartacus priceless.
This is not to say that the acting is any less laudable. Charles Laughton and Peter Ustinov, especially the latter, are worth buying the film for alone. The character of Batiatus must be acclaimed as one of cinema's all-time greats for his humanity and his credibility. Kirk Douglas does well, but is limited to being a hero, and thus to mediocrity. Lawrence Olivier is wonderfully coniving, with an intriguing softer side with which one can't quite sympathise. All the better to ensure that he is a superb villain. Yet minor characters are certainly not underused, and there are several poignant silent scenes amidst the slave army that give the story depth where one might otherwise quite easily be carried along soley on the events centring around the main characters.
One thing more - I can never hear anyone mention 'the classics' without picturing Crassus asking Antoninus what he does for a living...