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This is part 3 of 12 of my retrospective of Stanley Kubrick’s career.

At this time of the year, like clockwork, TV stations present Ben-Hur (and The Ten Commandments) due to its Judeo-Christian undertones. So of course I find it fitting to watch the “like that but better” movie Spartacus, instead with undertones of Communism.

Event though this is not a Kubrick movie per se, since Kubrick was a “for hire” directorial replacement by producer and lead actor Kirk Douglas, you can still feel his directorial presence. His signature precision, plays with shadows and out-of-focus foreground objects are all there. This movie is in color though, and it has superb color aesthetics, with many outside scenes filmed at dawn or sunset (the Criterion Edition’s color restoration really shines). Of course Kubrick prefers indoor sets, and Kubrick lets those incredible sets be properly displayed in the frame.

Oh, I forgot to mention the story. It’s about Spartacus leading a slave rebellion in Roman times, which had incidental effects on the rise of Crassus and Julius Caesar. It includes some epic battle scenes, great chemistry between Kirk Douglas as Spartacus and the female lead Jean Simmons, great acting by Peter Ustinov, and a long but well-paced 192-minutes story.

While it may not have been a long-term success like Ben-Hur, in my opinion it has a better, darker and more realistic story that ended up influencing recent movies like Bravehart and Gladiator. It also had a great influence at removing the anti-Communist blacklist of McCarthy in Hollywood. So, at 30, Kubrick had the balls to be able to direct for-hire a massively big and controversial movie, and I think that his atraction to controversial movies was just starting.