Where to watch Spartacus (1960)
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A rebellious slave is sold to a gladiator trainer and forced to learn the brutal demands of arena combat. After turning against his owners, he leads fellow slaves in a growing revolt, seeking freedom while Roman authorities work to crush their escape and restore control.
Cast: Kirk Douglas, Laurence Olivier, Jean Simmons, Charles Laughton, Peter Ustinov, John Gavin, Tony Curtis, Nina Foch, John Ireland, Herbert Lom, John Dall, Woody Strode
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Trivia & production notes
- Kirk Douglas pursued the Spartacus project after losing the lead role in Ben-Hur to Charlton Heston, a film he had wanted to make with director William Wyler.
- Yul Brynner was developing a rival Spartacus film called The Gladiators with director Martin Ritt, but abandoned the project to star in The Magnificent Seven instead.
- Howard Fast adapted his own novel into a screenplay that Kirk Douglas rejected as a disaster after 60 days of work.
- Dalton Trumbo, a blacklisted screenwriter, completed his screenplay for Spartacus in just two weeks to beat Yul Brynner's competing project.
- Kirk Douglas insisted on giving blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo full screen credit for Spartacus, which helped break the Hollywood blacklist and led President Kennedy to publicly attend the film despite protests from the American Legion.
- Anthony Mann directed the film for only two weeks before leaving the production due to disagreements with Kirk Douglas over the film's emphasis on its message rather than visual storytelling.
- Stanley Kubrick took over as director at age 30 and inherited a $12 million budget with a cast of 10,500, making it vastly larger than his previous film Paths of Glory, which cost only $935,000.
- Kubrick recorded sound from 76,000 spectators at a Michigan State-Notre Dame football game shouting battle cries to create the illusion of massive crowds in the film.
- Spanish infantry soldiers numbering about 8,000 were used as extras to portray the Roman army during battle scenes filmed on a plain outside Madrid.
- Kubrick cut nearly all of the gory battle scenes after negative reactions at test screenings, leaving only one intact.
Adapted from the Wikipedia article Spartacus (film), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.
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