[My Mint Lounge column this week]
A few weeks ago I moderated a conversation with the director Dibakar Banerjee at an event about gender empowerment and equality. Self-searchingly, choosing his words with care, Banerjee talked about the small ways in which gender roles used to be reaffirmed even in his well-educated family: during mealtimes, his sister always got up and served him when his plate needed to be replenished – this wasn’t a sternly imposed routine, it was just something everyone took as a given. It was only years later, having been more sensitized over time, that he properly reflected on such things.
I was reminded of a passage in The Ragman’s Son, the American actor Kirk Douglas’s wonderful memoir, published in 1988. Recalling little childhood games where he, as the boy, was expected to win battles of daring against his older sisters, Douglas wrote, “I wanted to feel like a man […] a man is supposed to be strong, to be active, he must do things […] What a lot of shit that is. All the movements now are encouraging women to be stronger. I’d like to be in a movement for men to be weaker. Why do men always have to be strong? We’re not, and we know it. Why do we force ourselves to play those roles?”
“Play those roles” – an interesting choice of words for a professional actor. I have been thinking quite a bit about Douglas, mainly because he turns one hundred next month, having outlived nearly all his contemporaries from one of filmdom’s greatest, most vital eras. But also because of a gap between some perceptions of his screen image – the man’s man that Hollywood sometimes required him to be – and what you see when you look more closely, both at the actor and the person.
Douglas was among the first Old Hollywood stars I encountered, courtesy his lead role as the slave rebel in the 1960 Spartacus, a film I adored as a teen. At the time, though, I was much less interested in him than in the British heavyweights – Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, Peter Ustinov – in the cast. Having simplistic notions about American stars being brawny types and Brits being more sophisticated, I may have felt Douglas was a glorified action hero whose main purpose was to look convincing in the gladiatorial scenes. It probably took me a while to notice how inward-looking his performance was, as an uneducated slave who grows in stature and eventually becomes more cultured – in the truest sense of that word – than the smooth-talking politicians in the Roman senate.
Taking a long-shot view of Douglas’s career, you might easily associate him with swaggering, macho roles. Square-jawed, well-built, quick in his movements and capable of looking very dangerous if required, he played a variety of such parts: from bad guys in film noir – notably in Out of the Past – to a tormented boxer in Champion, to one of the most unpleasant “heroes” of any 1950s Hollywood film, the newshound Chuck Tatum in Billy Wilder’s superb Ace in the Hole. He played cowboys alongside his friend and great contemporary Burt Lancaster, he played swashbuckling pirates and two-fisted detectives, he played the sort of character who grabs the heroine by her hair or neck and draws her to him in a show of male aggression. (Iconic scenes from Ace in the Hole and The Bad and the Beautiful come to mind.)
Shift to a close-up, though, and the vulnerabilities beneath the surface reveal themselves – not just when he portrayed a clearly emasculated figure (as in one of his best-known parts, the painter Vincent Van Gogh, in Lust for Life) but even in action roles: as the gunman Doc Holliday in Gunfight at the OK Corral, or as a doomed non-conformist in one of his personal favourites, Lonely are the Brave. The grand battle scenes in Spartacus are more than offset by the look of quiet despair mingled with pride in his eyes when his men rise as one claiming “I am Spartacus!” in an attempt to protect him from his captors.
Off-screen, Douglas had a clearly liberal sensibility: he helped the blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo get a screen credit again, after years of having to work pseudonymously, and he co-produced the anti-war film Paths of Glory – an essential, bitter antidote to hubristic ideas about patriotism and military heroism, just as relevant to the India of 2016 as it was to its original audiences. Many clues to the development of his personality, and his sensitization to various forms of oppression, can be found in The Ragman’s Son – in one telling passage, for instance, Douglas (who was born Issur Danielovitch, a child of Russian Jewish immigrants) describes how he first became aware of how non-Jews spoke about Jews in private, after he had changed his own name to a Gentile-sounding one.
Personal growth is a motif of that memoir – making mistakes, learning from them, then making new ones and starting over again – and nearly 30 years later its author is still active. “He not busy being born is busy dying,” wrote our new Nobel Laureate, Bob Dylan, once. Googling to see what Kirk Douglas is up to these days, I was pleased to find that his mind still seems sharp, and that he now blogs sporadically. In his last post, published around a month ago, he celebrated the many ways in which the world has changed and become more progressive since his own youth, but also drew a lucid, cautionary parallel between the rise of Hitler in the 1930s and the hate-mongering engaged in by the Trump campaign in the present day.
Happy hundredth, Kirk. And even if we can’t all be Spartacus, may we have a bit of him in us.
[Related posts: Ace in the Hole, Paths of Glory, Spartacus. And an anecdote about Douglas and John Wayne]
It would be putting things very mildly to say that recent Hindi movies haven’t made journalists – TV journalists in particular – look good. The typical representation is that of shrill, parasitic creatures tripping over each other in a mad frenzy, exhibiting buffoonery and insensitivity in equal measure as they thrust microphones into the faces of the unwilling.
The classic example of this theme was, of course, Peepli [Live], in which vanloads of predatory reporters arrive at a small village on the scent of the TRP-boosting “story” that a poor farmer has promised to kill himself. It was a portrayal of media both as an intrusive force in its own right and as a mirror in which a middle-class society built on “traditional values” could see its darker, more primal face.
But the template for the “ugly media” movie is Billy Wilder’s 1951 classic Ace in the Hole. Watching it again recently, I found it hard to believe it was six decades old – the story, about a personal tragedy being turned into a media carnival, is so ahead of its time that the film looks fresher and more relevant with each passing year.
To some extent, that’s true of most of Wilder’s work. His best movies are driven by acerbic screenplays that poke holes into just about any aspect of modern life – or social institution – you can think of. But even by his standards, Ace in the Hole is unusually savage and bleak. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, no happy ending, no bending to Hollywood norms about a lead character finding redemption.
In a recent film, Michael Douglas reprised the role of Gordon Gekko, the cold-blooded Wall Street trader whom he first played in 1987. But few actors could portray single-minded, obsessive characters as well as Douglas’s father Kirk. In Ace in the Hole, the senior Douglas is Chuck Tatum, a down-on-his-luck reporter stranded in a small town, working for an uninspiring local paper called the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin (its high-mindedness as well as general lack of imagination summed up by the depressingly earnest motto “Tell The Truth”). When a local tourist guide named Leo gets trapped inside an old mountain cave, Chuck realises he has a story that could help him get back to the top of his profession (read: back to the big newspapers in New York), and he milks it for all that it’s worth.
“I don’t make the news, I only report it,” Chuck says defensively at one point, but we see him manipulating events for his own benefit – even to the extent of coercing the rescue-operation chief to use an unnecessarily time-consuming method to save Leo. Some scenes are spine-chilling: during his first conversation with the trapped man, when Chuck discovers that the cave was an ancient Indian burial ground, his eyes gleam and become animated; you realise he’s less concerned with Leo’s plight than with the tantalizing headline of the next day’s paper.
Typically, Wilder fills the screenplay not just with brilliant lines that draw attention to themselves but sly asides as well (“We’re the press, we never pay!” grumbles a young photographer when asked to shell out 50 cents for admission). But watching Ace in the Hole, I was repeatedly reminded of Wilder’s great visual sense – something that is occasionally forgotten because he is seen primarily as a man of words. Consider the breathtaking overhead tracking shot that reveals dozens of cars and trailers recently arrived in what was once a deserted outpost. Or the scene where Chuck draws Leo’s manipulative wife towards him for a clinch by roughly grabbing her head (with the camera positioned behind her so that his giant fist nearly fills the screen) – it’s one of the most subversive variants I’ve seen on the classic Hollywood kiss.
But the most most striking images – and perhaps the abiding one – is a long shot of carnival debris being swept along by the wind, as Leo’s father wanders desolately about; the shot is almost a symbol for the grime that accumulates over the course of the movie. At the end, there's no one left to clean it up.
P.S. In a way, I think Ace in the Hole makes for an interesting companion piece to Sunset Boulevard, which Wilder made the year before – the visual and thematic similarities between the two movies should have any fan of the Auteur theory smacking his chops. For instance, both films begin with a man incapacitated by not having a working vehicle (or in danger of being deprived of his vehicle) – a situation that leads him to an isolated setting where he will feel trapped and creatively stymied. Without giving away specifics, both films, at key moments, have very artistically executed close-ups of a dead man seen from underneath, so that his face is almost looking down at the camera.
And of course, both stories, in different ways, are about the creation of the celebrity cult. For me, one of the most disturbing moments in Sunset Boulevard is the brief shot of the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (playing herself) in the final scene, where Norma Desmond (former silent-screen star, now a delusional old woman) descends the staircase, imagining she is about to make a grand comeback. Hopper is shown teary-eyed as she watches the faded star, but one can hardly forget the role that her own pen played in creating, sustaining and then destroying the image of Norma Desmond.
[Two earlier posts on Wilder films: Stalag 17 and Some Like it Hot]
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike th' inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
(from “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, by Thomas Gray)
There’s a harrowing scene late in Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory that help bring the film’s real concerns into clearer focus. Three soldiers of the French army have been condemned to death by their own superiors, for alleged cowardice in the face of a mission that we know was suicidal and unreasonable from the start. Their commanding officer, Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas), stands helplessly by: a lawyer in civilian life, he had tried to defend his men in the army court by pointing out their shows of courage in past missions, but to no avail.
Of the condemned men, one is relatively stoical about his fate; another is barely conscious because of an accident in his prison cell the previous night (leading one of the senior officers to tell a warden: “Make sure his eyes are open when the firing squad takes aim”). But the third man bawls all the way to the execution area. “Don’t kill me,” he wails, “I don’t want to die!” He squirms and flinches until the very last second of his life, and watching him we squirm too; weaned as we have been on war films founded on heroism and panache, we are now face to face with anti-heroism of the bleakest kind. And it’s much easier to identify with.
Up to this point, Paths of Glory had seemed to be a film about grave injustice; about three good soldiers being made scapegoats for the callous games of their power-mad superiors. The main question seemed to be: are they shirkers who had to be punished as an example, or brave men who were asked to perform an impossible task? But watching the terrified soldier resist the meaningless ending of his life, we realise that this is beside the point. The real question is: in the face of war’s insanity, is it reasonable to expect a sane person not to be a coward, to choose death over life? ("I can't understand these armchair officers, fellas trying to fight a war from behind a desk, worrying about whether a mouse is gonna run up their pants," says the callous General Mireau at one point. "I don't know, General," replies Dax. "If I had the choice between mice and Mausers, I'd take the mice every time.")
The question has of course been addressed before, in film and literature. One thinks of great comic works such as Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H* and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and it’s often been suggested that war is best treated as a horror-comedy. Paths of Glory is a rare example of a great anti-war film, indeed a great anti-heroic film, that is dramatic and austere on the surface and yet creates its own subversive comedy. How can you not smile in disbelief when Dax’s senior officer tells him not to quibble over fractions (they’re discussing whether the expected casualties would be 30 or 40 per cent of the squad). Or when two soldiers discuss whether it’s preferable to be killed by a bayonet or a machine gun. Or when Mireau, sealing the fate of his own soldiers, snaps, “If the little sweethearts won't face German bullets, they’ll face French ones!”
This was Kubrick’s breakthrough film, though by all accounts it was Kirk Douglas, the producer-star, who insisted on the downbeat (and un-Hollywoodish) ending. Given 
that Douglas began his career as a hunky leading man who specialised in physical roles (as in Champion; picture on left), it’s notable that this film, which stands in opposition to every idea of swaggering machismo, was so close to his heart. But then, he was always a much more interesting actor than a casual glance through his filmography would suggest: by the early 1950s, he had already started to expand his range, playing anti-heroic roles even within the framework of genre films such as Detective Story. Watching Paths of Glory helps me put in perspective his disagreements with John Wayne, who wanted macho leading men to play tough heroes, not “wimps”, onscreen (more on that in this post). If ever a film made a good case for “wimpishness” over “heroism”, this is it.
Paths of Glory is beautifully shot, justly famous for George Krause’s black-and-white photography, the long tracking shots in the trenches (the setting is WW1) and the performances, especially by George Macready as the power-hungry Mireau and veteran actor Adolphe Menjou as the manipulative General Broulard. To an extent, it suffers from the artificiality of American actors speaking in English while playing Frenchmen (it’s understood that this is cinematic licence, but it does get jarring, especially today, when we are more accustomed to realism – or at least to the idea of realism). Still, it was an enormous achievement for a film like this to even get made at a time when Hollywood was awash with gung-ho war movies that made guns and cannons look exciting. The biggest testament to its effectiveness is that it was banned in some countries (including France) for decades, and that it is still looked at askance by extreme right-wingers and by those who like to romanticise war. Luckily, the DVD is now widely available.
[Did an edited version of this for the New Sunday Express.]
Also see this lengthy analysis by Tim Dirks.
The very first shot in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is of a train pulling into a little railway station. Anyone familiar with the grammar of classic movie westerns will know that the railroad plays a very special role in these films: it’s a symbol of advancement, the bridge between the Old West and the New West; in some ways a bridge between savagery and civilisation. American mythology has it that before trains connected the Midwestern towns and frontiers with the East Coast, the rule of the gun prevailed. Authority figures were often irrelevant; the winner was usually the fastest draw.
On the train are the US senator Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) and his wife Hallie (Vera Miles), who have come to visit the small town of Shinbone where they had first met a long time ago. They are received at the station by an aging former Marshall, and one immediately senses the nostalgia in the air. “The place sure has changed, Link,” Hallie tells him, “Churches, high schools, shops…who would have thought it?” “The railroad’s done that, Hallie,” he replies. The tone of this conversation is telling. They are talking about the markers of civilisation, of human progress, yet there’s a residual sadness, a sigh of regret beneath the words. There’s something almost grudging about the acknowledgement that change has, on the whole, been for the better.
Stoddard and Hallie have come to Shinbone for the burial of an old friend named Tom Doniphon, a man hardly anyone in town even knows about. The editor of the local newspaper, thrilled at the chance to interview a possible future vice-president, presses Stoddard for details. Who was this Doniphon and why was he important enough for a US senator to take time off from his important schedule?
In flashback, we get the meat of the story: Ransom’s arrival in Shinbone as an idealistic young lawyer decades earlier, eager to bring education to the boondocks; his encounter with the savage outlaw Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) who has the townsfolk in perpetual fear; his arguments with the rugged Tom (John Wayne), who believes that the only way to deal with Valance is with a gun; his attempts to get the people to organise themselves into a community governed by proper laws; and finally, his reluctant confrontation with Valance – in a shootout scene that lays the ground for the film’s most famous line: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
Star personalities
John Wayne and James Stewart were 54 and 53 respectively when this film was made, and one of the standing criticisms of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is that they were far too old for their characters in the “flashback sequence” (which is, after all, 90 per cent of the film). Makeup helps to an extent, and one of the most notable things about Stewart’s performance as the young Ransom is how he quickens his reactions and physical movements without making it very obvious. He’s a lot more alert and sprightly than he presumably was in real life (in fact, even as a young man, Stewart’s stock in trade was a shuffling, slow walk and a Midwestern drawl – so this performance, given in his 50s, is probably among his most energetic ever!).
The criticism about age is of course justified from the point of view of verisimilitude, but it’s impossible to imagine this film without these men in the leading roles, for their screen personalities are crucial to its effect. Stewart, a more nuanced actor, was the modern man – vulnerable, complex, unafraid to show a feminine side (in fact, he spends some of the key scenes in this film in an apron, which has led to much critical analysis of gender roles!). This was reflected in the roles he played in middle age, especially in films by Hitchcock and Anthony Mann. Wayne, in contrast, was repeatedly used by Ford in their many films together as an emblem of the Old West – the macho cowboy who survived by his shooting skills. By all accounts, the screen image was not very far from the man’s real-life persona, for Wayne was known to be jingoistic, brow-beating, politically on the far right, pro-Vietnam War, full of notions about what “real men” must be like.
Watching him in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, I remember a story told by Kirk Douglas in his autobiography The Ragman’s Tale. Douglas, who himself frequently did macho-man roles early in his career, had just stretched himself as an actor by playing the tortured Vincent Van Gogh in Lust for Life. In his book, he recounts an incident involving Wayne, who was present at a private screening of the film:
[John] kept looking at me. We hadn’t worked together yet. He seemed upset. He had a drink in one hand, motioned to me with the other. Out on the terrace, he berated me. “Christ, Kirk! How can you play a part like that? There’s so goddamn few of us left. We got to play strong, tough characters. Not those weak queers.”
I tried to explain. “Hey John, I’m an actor. I like to play interesting roles. It’s all make-believe. It isn’t real. You’re not really John Wayne, you know.” He looked at me oddly. I had betrayed him. I took it as a compliment; the picture had moved him, or at least disturbed him.
This is one side of the story. For the other side, you need to watch Wayne in some of his best roles in films like The Searchers, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Red River – movies where he betrays a vulnerability, even a lack of self-confidence, beneath the posturing. Though a limited actor in many ways, he had the ability to convey the sadness and disaffection of a man who knows deep inside that his beliefs and values have no place in a rapidly changing world. Some of this can be seen in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: note the many scenes where Wayne watches Stewart with a curious little smile on his face, trying to figure him out. Or the way he observes 
the growing closeness between Ransom and Hallie and realises that he is losing “his girl” (another phrase that has its roots in an old patriarchal system) to a more sensitive man, a symbol of progress. Above all, note Ford’s seeming iconizing of Wayne in scenes like the key conversation between him and Stewart near the end of the film (the slow dissolve where, for a couple of seconds, what we see on screen is the sort of image that would be perfect for a postage stamp). But what Ford is doing here is more complex: he’s inverting the myth. This isn’t a Wayne character who will ride off triumphantly into the sunset; he’ll fade away quietly, spend his later days forgotten and alone.
This great film is about the passing of an old world. Despite some sentimentalising (as in the suggestion that Hallie continued to carry a torch for Tom; that she made the practical decision to marry Ransom and become a modern woman, but on some level was still in love with the rugged, uneducated frontiersman), it isn’t a mere elegy, for it recognises that many things about that old world were undesirable – who would argue in favour of the “let’s settle this with guns” brand of machismo? However, it gently makes the point that even when change is for the better, it’s possible to mourn the passing of a simpler time. It reminds us that the present is, after all, built on the bones of the past, and that various phases of transition have seen the crushing of the dreams of decent, well-meaning people. (In the context of the story, the implication is also that law and order in the West might never have been set down if it hadn’t been for the heroes of an earlier time, who went about things in a less “civilised” way. “Nothing’s too good for the man who shot Liberty Valance,” is the film’s ironical last line; but by this point we know better.)
Like many of the best Hollywood classics, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance can be appreciated foremost on narrative terms. The story, the dialogue and the performances (including Andy Devine as the cowardly Marshal Link Appleyard, and of course Lee Marvin as the petulant outlaw whipping his victims with a belt – a Method performance that's delightfully incongruous to this film) are of the highest order, and held together by one of the greatest of movie directors. John Ford made so many superb films that one tends to take his oeuvre for granted – rarely is there a singling out of this or that movie, the way one often sees done with Welles or Kurosawa or Hitchcock or Bergman. But this latter-day film is undeniably among his very best work.
[This is a much longer version of a piece I wrote for the New Sunday Express earlier in the week. A few previous posts on classic films: Strangers on a Train, Yojimbo, M*A*S*H, 8 1/2, Spartacus, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Twelve Angry Men, Peeping Tom, The Passion of Joan of Arc.]
When I started watching American and British cinema seriously, around 1990-91, my entry point into those movies (like that of most viewers who aren’t intrinsically interested in a technical aspect of filmmaking) was through the world of actors. For the longest time I was obsessed with star filmographies from Classic Hollywood (anytime between the late 1920s and the late 1960s). I would scan video-library catalogues for epic films with large star casts (and if the plot involved a historical period I was interested in, all the better) - which was how I came to see, in those very early days, movies like Judgement at Nuremberg, The Longest Day, Becket and How the West was Won. And most memorably of all, Spartacus.
Having just finished a minor school project on the decline of the Roman Empire, I had reason enough to be interested in the story of the slave revolt and its 
enigmatic leader, who almost brought the Empire to its knees in the 1st century BC. But there were other, less lofty reasons. To begin with, what a cast! There was the film’s producer, Kirk Douglas, in the title role (though to be honest, I thought Douglas was the most unobtrusive member of the cast at the time). A way-too-waiflike Jean Simmons as Spartacus’s lady love Varinia. Tony Curtis as the dreamy young poet Antoninus, who joins the slave revolt (I learnt later that the role had been written in for no better reason than that Curtis had told Douglas he wanted to be a part of the project!). And best of all, a great trio of British actors: Laurence Olivier as the Roman general Marcus Licinius Crassus (who was historically a member of ancient Rome’s First Triumvirate along with Pompey and Julius Caesar – though this doesn’t figure in the film); Charles Laughton as his political rival, the senator Gracchus; and the multitalented Peter Ustinov (who won the supporting actor Oscar for this role) as the wily slave-trader Batiatus.
And those were only the leading players. The supporting cast was equally interesting to me, since it included actors I was familiar with from other films, even in those early days. The woodenly handsome John Gavin, who had a small role here as the callow young Julius Caesar, had played Sam Loomis in Psycho. Also in a supporting role was John Dall, who was one of the homosexual killers in another Hitchcock film, Rope. All this helped make Spartacus a comforting experience, quite apart from the fact that I was enthralled by the movie itself.
The films we have a deep affection for as children rarely live up to our memories of them. Our tastes evolve as we get older (more so when film-watching is more than a hobby, as in my case), our gaze becomes more analytical and self-conscious on a repeat viewing, so that it’s possible to be slightly embarrassed by performances and dialogue that one originally had a very high opinion of. A scene that one’s memory had inflated into something very grand and elaborate turns out to be a trifle, lasting just a couple of seconds, when one re-watches it; it’s like returning to that mansion-like house you had visited as a child and finding that the halls and stairways are much narrower than you expected.
Over the years, when I returned to Spartacus, I was able to see the little flaws more easily – the Hollywoodisation (read: cheesiness) of some scenes, the incessant, manipulative music score, the fact that occasionally (but only occasionally) one gets so fascinated by the acting bouts between titans like Olivier and Laughton that one forgets about the characters they are playing. But in essence, my high opinion of it hasn’t changed. This is one of the best-written, best-acted, most intelligent epics of its time, superior in most ways to others of its time and genre (Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, Quo Vadis?, The Fall of the Roman Empire). Part of that superiority comes from the fact that there are no religious overtones in the story at all (this was something that made many of the period epics of the time both maudlin and distracting) – the focus is entirely on the internal politics in the Roman senate.
The Stanley Kubrick quandary
I find it annoying that Spartacus has suffered a decline in critical appreciation for a reason that doesn’t have much to do with the actual merits or demerits of the film itself. The facts are these: the movie carries a “directed by Stanley Kubrick” credit and Kubrick, as most of us know, was one of the great directors (more crucially, a great auteur-director). But on Spartacus he was a pawn – he was hurriedly brought in after the original director Anthony Mann had quit, and throughout the shooting he not only had to be subservient to Kirk Douglas’s vision, he also had to deal with the massive egos of the British actor-directors working in the film. By all accounts it was a traumatic experience for him and in subsequent years, short of actually disowning Spartacus, he did everything to make it clear that it wasn’t “his” film. And over the years, as Kubrick’s own reputation as a master filmmaker (deservedly) grew, some critics and moviegoers turned their resentment to this one film he never had full control over.
But this is silly reasoning. Just because Spartacus isn’t a good Stanley Kubrick film doesn’t mean it can’t be a good film on its own terms. Agreed, there are certain kinds of movies that would fail miserably if their directors weren’t allowed full control. But this isn’t one of them. It was already in production long before Kubrick arrived on the sets, it had been carefully scripted and planned by some of the most dedicated people in the craft (including the writer Dalton Trumbo, who had been on the Hollywood blacklist for Communist affiliations and who Douglas permitted to use his own name on the project) – and the results are there for all to see. This film is a remarkable collaborative effort between some of the most talented people (across all fields) in the film industry of the time, and a movie that somehow managed to shape up coherently despite a long and very problematic filming process.
However, there’s something else that gets overlooked. When a great artist contributes to a work, no matter how half-heartedly, it’s inevitable that he’ll leave his stamp on it. Notwithstanding Kubrick’s own resentment of the film, Spartacus does also contain a few ideas and visuals that foreshadow his later work – notably the theme of the conflict between humanity and mechanisation. Spartacus postulates that the practice in ancient Rome was to turn human beings into machines through the practice of slavery - world dominance was maintained by stripping people of their humanity and turning them into cogs in the machinery that kept the Roman Empire running. Some scenes (the clinical, relentlessly efficient Roman battalions intercut with the disorganised slave camp; the cold gleam in the eye of the sadistic slave-master who was once a slave himself) palpably come from the same hand that gave us Dr Strangelove struggling with his own mechanical arm, Alex being systematically transformed into a Clockwork Orange, and the magnificent image of Dave Bowman dismantling the computer HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Over 1200 words. Lots more to say but will stop now.
P.S. As I mentioned in the previous post, the special features on the DVD are awesome, especially the commentary by Kirk Douglas, Peter Ustinov, Howard Fast, Saul Bass and restoration expert Robert Harris, and the long interview with Ustinov where he supplies some uproarious impressions of Olivier and Laughton. Excellent DVD review here, by the way.
And if you’re interested in knowing more about the film and its shooting, do read Douglas’s wonderful autobiography The Ragman’s Son.
I was reminded of a passage in The Ragman’s Son, the American actor Kirk Douglas’s wonderful memoir, published in 1988. Recalling little childhood games where he, as the boy, was expected to win battles of daring against his older sisters, Douglas wrote, “I wanted to feel like a man […] a man is supposed to be strong, to be active, he must do things […] What a lot of shit that is. All the movements now are encouraging women to be stronger. I’d like to be in a movement for men to be weaker. Why do men always have to be strong? We’re not, and we know it. Why do we force ourselves to play those roles?”
Taking a long-shot view of Douglas’s career, you might easily associate him with swaggering, macho roles. Square-jawed, well-built, quick in his movements and capable of looking very dangerous if required, he played a variety of such parts: from bad guys in film noir – notably in Out of the Past – to a tormented boxer in Champion, to one of the most unpleasant “heroes” of any 1950s Hollywood film, the newshound Chuck Tatum in Billy Wilder’s superb Ace in the Hole. He played cowboys alongside his friend and great contemporary Burt Lancaster, he played swashbuckling pirates and two-fisted detectives, he played the sort of character who grabs the heroine by her hair or neck and draws her to him in a show of male aggression. (Iconic scenes from Ace in the Hole and The Bad and the Beautiful come to mind.)
