WORLD TOUR Day 36 - Southern Italy
BEFORE: I'm finally leaving the British Isles - after covering Muppets, Charles Dickens, and Roman centurions. Yep, seems about right. But sticking with the Roman Empire points me in the direction of Italy, just in time for Columbus Day. Linking from "The Eagle", Donald Sutherland was also in "The Dirty Dozen" with George Kennedy, who according to the IMDB is in here somewhere as a rebel soldier. (If that seems like cheating, Sutherland was also in "Johnny Got His Gun" with Charles McGraw.)
THE PLOT: The slave Spartacus leads a violent revolt against the decadent Roman empire.
AFTER: This is one of those big-budget epic films still on my never-seen list - I'll try to get to "Gandhi" and "Gone With the Wind" next year. With an over three-hour running time, I had to wait for the right day to watch this one. Even with the help of the holiday, I still had to watch the first two hours early Monday morning and finish up the rest later in the day. I don't like getting my required four hours of sleep in the middle of a movie, but I'm hamstrung by the shortcomings of the human work schedule. I tried to tape this one off of TCM and failed twice, so my BFF Andy helped me out last Christmas with a real DVD copy. Widescreen, so I can see what a 50,000 member Roman army is supposed to look like.
This is a Stanley Kubrick film, but made before he got all weird and artsy on us with films like "2001" and "A Clockwork Orange" - so it has more common with classics like "Ben-Hur" and (I presume) "Cleopatra". It's also a game-changer in its own way, since without it we might never have had "Gladiator" or "Braveheart". Essentially it's review-proof, this film's going to endure no matter how many nitpick points I'm able to find.
The plot concerns an army of slaves in the Roman Empire, first formed by gladiators, loosely based on a real slave uprising in the 1st century BCE. The Romans trained the slaves in the fighting arts, so really, they brought it upon themselves. Makes sense.
What doesn't make sense is how LONG it takes for the Roman Army to get to Capua to quell the rebellion. The army marches out of Rome near the start of the film, but they never quite get there. What the heck, did they walk there backwards? Didn't they have horses?
My other problem is that though there are a few fantastic battle scenes, it's not necessarily enough to justify the long running time. Kubrick seemed to have ignored the "Show, don't tell" rule, since much of the plot is advanced via conversations between senators in Roman bathhouses. "I hear that Spartacus has taken Salerno!" "Really?"
If you can keep the senators straight, though, and tell Crassus from Gracchus, you do get a look at how military power in the Roman Empire worked, and why so much of it got shifted on to a young Julius Caesar at one point. Keep your eye on that one, he's going places. But watching a discussion of the dissolution of the senate, along with a rebellion against the Empire, I can't help but feel like I've seen parts of this plotline before... (Crassus = Palpatine?)
NITPICK POINT: The background of Spartacus is a mystery, of course, but how did one trained in hand-to-hand combat become such a brilliant large-scale military strategist?
Starring Kirk Douglas (last seen in "Paths of Glory"), Laurence Olivier (last seen in "Marathon Man"), Peter Ustinov (last seen in "The Great Muppet Caper"), Jean Simmons, Charles Laughton, Tony Curtis (last seen in "Elvis Meets Nixon"), Herbert Lom (last seen in "The Ladykillers"), John Gavin, John Ireland (last seen in "All the King's Men"), Woody Strode (last seen in "The Quick and the Dead").
DISTANCE TRAVELED TODAY: 1,407 miles / 2,265 km (Edinburgh, Scotland to Capua, Italy, then Rome)
DISTANCE TRAVELED SO FAR: 11,017 miles / 17,734 km
RATING: 7 out of 10 pirate ships
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