Big Screen Rome - Amazon Web Services

end of the sequence, as the director’s name is flashed on the screen,
the face of a classical statue cracks and falls apart, with only one eye left
staring at the audience, suggesting the instability of film as a medium of
truth. Instead of the impressive opening shots of marching Roman legions
typical from earlier epics, the first frame of Spartacus reveals a lone
Roman soldier enforcing discipline at the slave camp in Libya, as one
scholar observes: “Rome’s presence in the world is thus reduced to its
basic impact: containment through force” (Futrell, 2001, 99). The opening
voice-over, written and appended during the studio’s contentious reediting
after the film was shot, introduces an unexpected note of Christian
ideology, perhaps in anticipation of the religious imagery at the end of the
film (Cooper, 1996b; Wyke, 71). While stooped slaves are shown hacking
rocks out of the hillside, a vibrant male voice establishes the polarity between
liberty and subjugation, and casts Spartacus as a resolute symbol of
the eternal fight for personal and political autonomy:
In the last century before the birth of the new faith called Christianity,
which was destined to overthrow the pagan tyranny of Rome and bring
about a new society, the Roman Republic stood at the very center of the
civilized world. “Of all things fairest,” sang the poet, “first among cities and
home of the gods is golden Rome.” Yet even at the zenith of her pride and
power, the Republic lay fatally stricken with a disease called human slavery.
The age of the dictator was at hand, waiting in shadows for the event to
bring it forth. In that same century, in the conquered Greek province of
Thrace, an illiterate slave woman added to her master’s wealth by giving
birth to a son whom she named Spartacus. A proud, rebellious son, who
was sold to living death in the mines of Libya before his thirteenth birthday.
There under whip and chain and sun, he lived out his youth and young
manhood, dreaming the death of slavery two thousand years before it
finally would die.
In the starring role, Kirk Douglas is forceful yet sympathetic, playing
Spartacus with a powerful and authentic physical presence, while baring
the hero’s strong passions on his chiseled face with its famously cleft chin.
One of Hollywood’s most resourceful and accomplished leading men, the
steely-voiced actor had recently played the title role in Ulysses (1955),
Vincent van Gogh in Lust for Life (1956), for which he was Oscar nominated,
and a war-weary colonel in Kubrick’s pacifist Paths of Glory. Scholars
note how Douglas envisioned the character of Spartacus as a Moses-like
figure, a patriarch leading his people to a Promised Land he will never see
(Elley, 110–11; Wyke, 69). Yet in music and imagery, the film also equates
SPARTACUS (1960) 105