Who’s Spartacus? Freedom and Socialism in a Cold War American Toga Film
Mark W. Graham Ph.D.
On the second Friday evening of his presidency, John F. Kennedy’s entertainment choice
was as public as it was political. In order to get into a theater near the White House, Kennedy
had to physically cross a picket line of the American Legion. Showing that night was Spartacus,
a film which had been stirring controversy well ahead of its release. The film had been based
largely on an unabashedly Marxist novel of the same name, published a decade earlier by
Howard Fast, then an active member of the Communist Party of the United States and winner of
the Stalin Prize for 1953. The film’s opening credits Marxist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo; this
was the first time that Trumbo had been credited on a film since his blacklisting by the House
Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947 for contempt of Congress. John Wayne and
actress/conservative columnist Hedda Hopper denounced the film in no uncertain terms, the
latter declaring, “The story was sold to Universal from a book written by a Commie and the
screen script was written by a Commie, so don’t go see it.” The Catholic Legion of Decency
likewise roundly condemned the film, urging all Roman Catholics to avoid it, while the ultraright John Birch Society declared the film “well-camouflaged” Communist propaganda.1 On his
way out of the theater that night, Kennedy declared to a reporter, “It was fine.”2
According to one film critic, Kennedy’s attendance at the film that evening was “the
single most important endorsement” the film received.3 Soon, Left and Right were watching the
film together in record numbers, delivering a stunning profit for one of the most expensive films
1
Preceding quotation and examples from Martin M. Winkler, “The Holy Cause of Freedom: American Ideals in
Spartacus,” in Spartacus: Film and History, ed. Martin M. Winkler, 154-188 at 168 (Malden, MA: Blackwell,
2007).
2
“Kennedy Attends Movie in Capital,” New York Times, February 5, 1961, 39.
3
J. Hoberman, The Dream Life: Movies, Media and the Mythology of the Sixties (New York: Free Press, 2003), 36.
1 made up to its time. The film went on to capture four Academy Awards as well as a Golden
Globe Award for the Best Dramatic Film of the year for 1961. Some speculate that it could also
have won Best Picture had it not been for opposition from the Hollywood Right of John Wayne
and company.4
How, during the Cold War, did such a film see the light of day in the United States; and
why, given its apparently Marxist pedigree, could it have been so successful, grossing over 60
million dollars? Answering these questions takes us from Roman Republican antiquity up to the
colorful heights of Hollywood historical epics circa mid-twentieth century. The story that
emerges shows the blurring of lines between perennially American ideologies and socialist ideals
as well as clearly illustrates the political manipulation of the past. Kirk Douglas, whose Bryna
Studios produced the film, responded to critics that it was actually “an American statement by an
American film company about the cause of freedom and the dignity of man.”5 Many scenes in
the film, though, have been interpreted convincingly in light of socialist ideologies of solidarity
and critique of private property. This paper will answer the above questions, beginning with the
Spartacus of history and then will proceed to show how Spartacus has been used in modern
history, culminating with the memorable silver screen image of the early 1960s.
In Search of the Historical Spartacus (or, Will the Real Historical Spartacus Please Stand
Up)
The image of Spartacus which appeared in theaters in 1960-61, subsequently impressed
as deeply on American popular consciousness as the cleft on Kirk Douglas’ chin, has an
4
5
Winkler, Spartacus, 41.
Maria Wyke, Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema, and History (New York: Routledge, 1997), 65.
2 intriguing history. Considering this longer history will provide crucial context for the film and its
narrative decisions.
The Spartacus of history is a notoriously elusive and little known character. The church
father St. Augustine, writing several centuries after the famed revolt of Spartacus, noted how
difficult even Rome’s historians found it to explain Spartacus’ revolt.6 Such uncertainty has
made Spartacus perfect fodder as an ideologically charged exemplar for later ages. Karl Marx,
for example, considered Spartacus “the most splendid fellow in the whole of ancient history” and
a “noble character, real representative of the ancient proletariat.”7 Vladimir Lenin was also a
staunch admirer. On the opposite side of the ideological spectrum, Ronald Reagan would cite
Spartacus as an “example of sacrifice and struggle for freedom.”8
The salient facts about the historical Spartacus can be summarized in short order,
especially since the entire historical record amounts to under ten pages with all surviving sources
combined, and simple redundancies factored out.9 He was a Roman auxiliary soldier turned
slave, turned gladiator, who led a slave revolt in Italy in 73 B.C. The revolt began in a
gladiatorial school in Capua with 70 men and soon thereafter grew exponentially as many more
slaves and freemen (proletarii) and even women joined the swelling rebel army which modern
historians estimate reached somewhere between 70,000 and 120,000. Stunningly defeating nine
Roman armies over the course of the next two years, Spartacus and his band ranged throughout
the Italian countryside, shaking Rome to its foundations. The slave army was finally annihilated
in battle by the late Roman Republican warlord Crassus in 71 B.C., who subsequently crucified
6
St. Augustine, City of God 3.26.
Karl Marx Letter to Friedrich Engels, 27 February 1861, Karl Marx-Friedrich Engels: Werke, 30 (Berlin: Dietz,
1974).
8
Cited in Barry Strauss, The Spartacus War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), 5.
9
Ancient writers who narrate the revolt are Plutarch, Appian, and Sallust. There are brief references by Livy,
Velleius Paterculus, Lucius Annaeus Florus, Sextus Julius Frontinus, and Paulus Orosius.
7
3 any survivors he captured, lining miles of road with about 6,000 crosses. Spartacus himself was
killed in the final battle (contra, significantly, the 1960 film) and his body was never found.
After these basic facts, the historical speculation begins. Conspicuously absent from any
ancient records are the motivations that drove Spartacus and his army, or any hint of the
ambitions which kept the slave revolt alive for a full two years. The only hint we get is that a
former Roman soldier desired to be free again, and he and others did not wish to be the
entertainment for spectators any longer.10 Available evidence does not begin to explain the
continuation of the movement or its ultimate goals, if ever there were any. Spartacus was
certainly no hero to Roman writers, even those reflecting back decades and centuries after the
event. The few ancient authors who mention him generally do so with suspicion and
denunciation of his “movement.” Plutarch describes “the insurrection of the gladiators and their
devastation of Italy, which is generally called the war of Spartacus.”11 Orosius describes the
slaves as combining “acts of killing, arson, robbery, and rape indiscriminately.”12 The explicitly
moralist Sallust is somewhat sympathetic toward Spartacus himself, but only to make a more
general point about slaves by showing Spartacus as powerless to prevent “the rape of young girls
and married women” and other atrocities carried out by the slave army; “to the nature of slaves
nothing is too sacred or too unspeakable.”13
Such negative press by ancient writers is hardly surprising. Ancient Roman authors,
usually slaveholders themselves, would be expected to roundly condemn a slave uprising which,
to their view, simply wreaked havoc and upset the order which Romans prized. In fact, aside
from brief descriptions of Spartacus himself as brave (even if foolish and/or rash), one cannot
10
See for example, Appian, The Civil Wars, 116.
Plutarch, Life of Crassus, 8.
12
Orosius, History Against the Pagans, 5.24.
13
Sallust, The Histories, 3.
11
4 find any source from the next millennium and a half which views him or the slave revolt in
anything close to positive terms. Or any terms for that matter—“before the mid-decades of the
eighteenth century, Spartacus was, for all intents and purposes, unknown as the mythical
historical figure that he was to become.”14 In short, Spartacus was forgotten in the West for about
1500 years.
Beginning in the latter half of the eighteenth century, however, Spartacus suddenly
reappeared, and with a decidedly positive, new, and fundamentally different meaning than any
appearing in the ancient sources. Although mentioned here and there in a few early modern texts
discussing slavery, it was actually a stage production on Spartacus and then a claim by the
Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire that together gave birth to the modern myth of Spartacus, the
myth that culminates with the 1960s film. It is worth noting that Spartacus’ modern popular
legacy emerged almost entirely from literary and/or stage productions rather than from actual
historical studies.
In 1760, French playwright Bernard Saurin staged his Spartacus: A Tragedy in Five Acts,
introducing the obscure slave revolt leader to the West. This was the first time that Spartacus
would become a figure of popular culture,15 and the meaning was as clear as it was out of tune
with all the historical sources. Saurin claimed “to evoke the picture of a great man . . . who
would combine the brilliant qualities of the heroic men of justice and humanity . . . a man who
was great for the good of men and not for the evil that they suffered . . . . His real aim was the
abolition of slavery, whose chains he broke.”16 A few years later, after reviewing a manuscript of
the play, the French philosopher Voltaire wrote a letter to Saurin: “Sir, I thank you with all my
14
Brent D. Shaw, “Spartacus Before Marx,” Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics (Nov. 2005), 5.
Shaw, “Spartacus Before Marx,” 11-12.
16
Shaw, “Spartacus Before Marx,” 12.
15
5 heart. I love Spartacus: That’s my sort of man; he is a lover of freedom and that’s that.”17 Soon
thereafter, in his famous Encyclopédie, Voltaire randomly and boldly makes the claim that of all
wars, “that led by Spartacus was the most just, and perhaps the only just war” in world history.18
The modern historical myth of Spartacus, thus, sprang forth from a fictional play which inspired
an encyclopedia entry. Spartacus would become the freedom-fighter he never was, defending a
modern cause he never could have imagined.
Revolutionaries of the late eighteenth and early- to mid-nineteenth century soon latched
onto Spartacus as a model of resistance to real or perceived oppression. Figures of both the
American and French Revolutions used him as a model of resistance against tyranny. Shortly
thereafter, in the French colony of Saint Domingue in the Caribbean, a rebel slave army led by a
black freedman, François Dominique Toussaint Louverture, helped establish Haiti (as it is now
called) as the first independent black state outside of Africa. Louverture was inspired in part by
reading ancient history and literature. Within a few decades of his revolt, Louverture was hailed
in memory as “The Black Spartacus.”19 In France, in 1830, a statue of Spartacus appeared in the
Tuilleries.20 Spartacus would serve as an important model for Garibaldi’s nationalist movement
in Italy. In fact, anywhere in Europe a small group was fighting for freedom against the odds; the
image/myth of Spartacus soon became central. Spartacus was adaptable to any revolutionary
cause just as is Che Guevera in our own day (and equally susceptible to gross historical
distortion).
The literary and intellectual image of Spartacus emanating from France made its way to
America in short order. Robert Montgomery Bird, a failed American medical doctor who turned
17
Shaw, “Spartacus Before Marx,” 12.
Shaw, “Spartacus Before Marx,” 12.
19
C. Knight, ed,. The Penny Cyclopæædia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (London: Knight &
Co, 1843), 25:96.
20
Wyke, Projecting, 37.
18
6 to writing for income, gave direct credit to Voltaire for Bird’s own theater production of
Spartacus.21 Bird, known for plays which explored popular notions of freedom, completed his
greatest play, The Gladiator, in 1831. First produced in New York City, the play explored
Spartacus and the slave wars. It “was the object of an enormous (some claim an unparalleled)
number of performances in Bird’s own lifetime,”22 and held the American stage for over seventy
years.23 The play performed in England as well, where it inspired Jacob Jones’ play Spartacus,
or the Roman Gladiator, which, in turn, introduced Spartacus to the British public.
The Making of the Marxist Spartacus
Nobody, though, shaped modern perceptions of Spartacus more decidedly than Karl
Marx, who saw (or, rather, imagined) in Spartacus’ movement a clear example of the active class
consciousness and class struggle which lay at the heart of his historical theory. Marx was
particularly fascinated with the Roman Republic, borrowing his term “proletariat” directly from
the name for landless persons of the late Roman Republic (proletarii). In 1865, Karl Marx’s
eldest daughter Jenny, playing a game with her father, asked him to list favorite heroes; Marx
replied “Spartacus and Kepler.”24 The connection between Spartacus and Marx has become so
tight that all modern renditions of Spartacus, scholarly or otherwise, either take the connection
for granted or feel obliged to challenge it up front. “The most splendid fellow in the whole of
ancient history,” as Marx termed Spartacus, is tall praise for a name which just over one hundred
years before would hardly have been recognized in the most classicist of intellectual circles, let
alone in the popular consciousness, and which was roundly condemned in all primary sources.
21
Shaw, “Spartacus Before Marx,” 18.
Shaw, “Spartacus Before Marx,” 20.
23
Wyke, Projecting, 59.
24
Nic Fields, Spartacus and the Slave Wars 73-71 B.C.: A Gladiator Rebels against Rome (Oxford: Osprey, 2009),
86.
22
7 The figure of Spartacus has become so enmeshed with Marxism and in images of class
struggle that recent historians of the ancient world have an uphill struggle themselves in even
questioning the claim. Foremost historian of the late Roman Republic, Erich Gruen, puts the
problem in a way that shows clearly what judicious historians are up against:
It causes no surprise that Marxist historians and writers have idealized Spartacus as a
champion of the masses and leader of the one genuine social revolution in Roman
history. That, however, is excessive. Spartacus and his companions sought to break the
bond of their own grievous oppression. There is no sign that they were motivated by
ideological considerations to overturn the social structure. The sources make clear that
Spartacus endeavored to bring his forces out of Italy toward freedom rather than to
reform or reverse Roman society. The achievements of Spartacus are no less formidable
for that. The courage, tenacity, and ability of the Thracian gladiator who held Roman
forces at bay for some two years and built a handful of followers into an assemblage of
over 120,000 men can only inspire admiration . . . . . . . . But no suggestion emerges
anywhere in the sources that the rebels were motivated by idealistic dreams of the
equality of slave and free; still less that they aimed at an overthrow and reconstruction of
the social order. Their activities pointed toward self-liberation and escape from Italy.25
Suffice it to say that nowhere in the ancient sources (such has not stopped Marxists from
historical claims before…) is there the slightest hint that Spartacus or any member of his rebel
group acted on behalf of Marxist class interest. Not one of the escaped slaves, freedmen, or even
freemen and women who fought together would have dreamed of trying to end the institution of
slavery, as the 1960 film clearly claims in its authoritative opening voice-over: “There under
whip and chain and sun, [Spartacus] lived out his youth and young manhood, dreaming the death
of slavery two thousand years before it would finally die.” Spartacus and his slave soldiers,
naturally, hated being enslaved themselves, not the institution of slavery which they would have
taken as a given. All, no doubt, would have been happy to own slaves; they just personally
preferred not to be slaves.
25
Erich Gruen, The Last Generation of the Roman Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 20,
406.
8 By the late nineteenth and into the early twentieth century, under Marx’s influence,
Spartacus became a regular symbol of socialist workers’ movements. The gladiator-turned-rebel
army leader came to stand for resistance to capitalist domination, and the writings of “German
Socialists, Soviet historians, Italian Communists, and American labor leaders and union
activists” eagerly embraced the Marxist myth26 as “Spartacus came to be read as acutely relevant
to the consolidation of the modern class struggle.”27 The famed German socialist revolutionaries
Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, for example, termed their movement the Spartakusbund,
the Spartacus League, which mounted a socialist coup in Germany in January of 1919. Karl
Liebknecht himself delivered a rousing (if over-the-top) panegyric on Spartacus: “The
Spartacus—by which I mean fire and spirit, I mean soul and heart, I mean will and action for the
revolution of the proletariat. And Spartacus by which I mean all need and yearning for
happiness, all resolution for battle of the class-conscious proletariat. Then Spartacus, by which I
mean socialism and world revolution.”28 In America, late-nineteenth-century socialist labor
activists like Cyrenus Osborne idealized Spartacus in similarly glowing terms: “Spartacus was
one of the great generals of history; fully equal to Hannibal and Napoleon, while his cause was
much more just and infinitely nobler, his life a model of the beautiful and virtuous, his episode of
surprising grandeur.”29
The Marxist revolutionary Spartakusbund movement as well as the aforementioned book
by American socialist Cyrenus Osborne Ward were actually the raw material behind the
Spartacus film of 1960. Both would directly inspire Howard Fast, the author of the 1951 novel
26
Monica Silveira Cyrino, Big Screen Rome (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 101.
Wyke, Projecting, 48.
28
Alison Futrell, “Seeing Red: Spartacus as Domestic Economist,” in Imperial Projections: Ancient Rome in
Modern Popular Culture, eds. Sandra R. Joshel, Margaret Malamud, and Donald McGuire, Jr., 77-118, at 90
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
29
Cyrenus O. Ward, The Ancient Lowly: A History of the Ancient Working People, from the Earliest Known Period
to the Adoption of Christianity by Constantine (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1888), vi.
27
9 upon which the film was based. As usual, a popular image of Spartacus emerged from literature,
not from history. This gets us closer to the heart of our story.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, figures caught up in the McCarthyite “Red Scare”
found a powerful symbol in Spartacus. In 1947, Howard Fast, one of the most prolific American
writers of the 20th century (The sale of his novels hovers around 80 million.), was called before
the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and asked to “name names”
participating in leftist organizations.30 Fast, an active member of the Communist Party of the
United States and a Leftist labor activist, refused to cooperate, was convicted of contempt, and
imprisoned in West Virginia in 1950. While reading in the prison library, he came across
mentions of Liebknecht’s and Luxemburg’s Spartakusbund, and his curiosity piqued, began to
explore the name of their organization. The name and his current situation inspired him to
research and then write a novel on Spartacus, using the book by American socialist activist
Cyrenus Osborne Ward for detail. For Fast, Spartacus came to symbolize those artists whom Fast
and others perceived as oppressed by the HUAC/McCarthyite “witch hunts” and blacklists. Fast
never denied or concealed what he was up to with his novel: He would later recall, “The country
was as close to a police state as it have ever been. J. Edgar Hoover, the chief of the FBI, took on
the role of a petty dictator. The fear of Hoover and his file on thousands of liberals permeated the
country. No one dared to vote and speak against our imprisonment. As I said, it was not the
worst time to write a book like Spartacus.”31
Although a well-established writer with fourteen novels and a number of short stories to
his credit, no publisher would consider the story of Spartacus which Fast began in prison, and so
he was forced to self-publish his novel in 1951. Fast claims that J. Edgar Hoover himself advised
30
31
Cyrino, Big Screen Rome, 102.
Cyrino, Big Screen Rome, 102.
10 publishers not to touch the work.32 The novel, clearly pushing a socialist agenda, however,
became “an immediate popular sensation, one of the most financially successful self-published
novels of the century,”33 selling nearly 50,000 copies in its first three months.34 Fast himself
acknowledged that reading the book was “an act of defiance by people who loathed the climate
of the time.”35 As one author put it, “using the little that is known about Spartacus as a
springboard, Fast modeled the gladiator struggle to overthrow the Roman Empire in order to
restore a legendary Golden Age of primitive tribal communism said to have existed in some
distant epoch prior to the advent of human exploitation.”36
In Fast’s telling, Spartacus came to stand for the “liberation of the masses of laboring
men and women, the productive members of society, from their ‘enslavement’ by the parasitic
possessors of wealth and property.”37 At one point in Fast’s novel, he unsubtly channels Marx
directly with a call to “the slaves of the world” to “rise up and cast off your chains!”38 At
another, the slave army expresses its creed: “Whatever we take, we hold in common, and no man
shall own anything but his weapons and his clothes.”39 Fast would later claim that he was drawn
to the story of Spartacus because “all my life I have always been intensely interested in the
struggles of the poor and of working people against their oppressors” (among whom he, of
course, put America and capitalism in general).40 Fast’s novel would become the textual basis for
32
“Spartacus: An Interview with Howard Fast,” an AncientSites chat with Mr. Fast, 28 June 2000.
http://www.trussel.com/hf/ancient.htm.
33
Cyrino, Big Screen Rome, 102.
34
Andrew MacDonald, Howard Fast: A Critical Companion (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996), 84.
35
Cited in Wyke, Projecting, 62.
36
Duncan L. Cooper, “Dalton Trumbo vs. Stanley Kubrick: Their Debate Over the Political Meaning of Spartacus”
The Kubrick Site, http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0101.html, 1.
37
William Vance, America’s Rome, 1: Classical Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 33.
38
Howard Fast, Spartacus (New York: Blue Heron, 1951), 171.
39
Fast, Spartacus, 166.
40
“Spartacus: An Interview.”
11 the 1960 film, and Fast himself was consulted by both director Stanley Kubrick and Kirk
Douglas in the editing and production of the film.
Spartacus Goes to Hollywood
After World War II, historical epics became major elements of Hollywood, and provided
a way for the theater to compete with television.41 A string of very popular epics set in the
ancient world—Quo Vadis, The Ten Commandments, The Robe, Demetrius and the Gladiators,
Ben-Hur, and Spartacus—solidified the genre. In each case, a small persecuted group (whether
Jews, Christians, or slaves) stood up powerfully for freedom against tyrannical oppressors
(whether Egyptians, Romans, or patricians). Not surprisingly, these historical epics were as much
as, if not more, a reflection of the time they appeared rather than the period of the past they
claimed to portray.42 Perhaps director Mervyn LeRoy overstated the case when he said of his
blockbuster Quo Vadis “I have done my best to do three things in this movie . . . entertain an
audience, get people to think about the problems of our time, and make money for MGM.”43
Helping the audience understand history in anything close to an accurate way, note, did not make
LeRoy’s list.
Spartacus was among the most expensive films ever made up to its time. As one scholar
poignantly put it, “its cost of $12,000,000 exceeded by three quarters of a million the price for
which the entire [Universal] studio was sold while the film was in production.”44 To put it
lightly, this represented a significant risk: “a production handled by an independent film
company [Douglas’ Bryna Productions], using a relatively unknown director [a young Stanley
41
Winkler, “Holy Cause,” 157.
Winkler, “Holy Cause,” 157.
43
Cyrino, Big Screen Rome, 33.
44
Winkler, Spartacus, 1-2.
42
12 Kubrick], a controversial screenwriter [Dalton Trumbo], and a best-selling novel that many
considered a Marxist parable [Howard Fast’s Spartacus].”45 Wasn’t there a Cold War on after
all?
Incidentally, at the same moment that Kirk Douglas’ Bryna production was working on
the initial stages of Spartacus, there was actually another Spartacus film in the works with
another company, and also using a blacklisted screenwriter, Abraham Polonsky. The figure of
Spartacus and the use of blacklisted writers were both in the air, it seems. In this other film
project, which never saw the light of day, Yul Brynner was to be cast as Spartacus and Anthony
Quinn as Crassus; Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, and Peter Ustinov (all of whom ended up
with major roles in the Kirk Douglas version) were each sent the Polonsky script also, but chose
the ultimately successful Douglas version instead.
In 1947, the famous Waldorf Statement had been signed by all major film studio heads.
Worried about the pervasive influence which cinema exerted, the Waldorf Statement was
essentially a vow by studios to refuse employment of any known Communist in the film
industry. Then, as now, many believed that the film industry has great potential for modeling
social and cultural norms, and there were, of course, self-avowed and known Communists who
had been working in cinema. Specific themes also were singled out which were off-limits in
American cinema—critiques of private property, organized religion, and other mainstays of
American society.46 To critique these was considered un-American and disloyal. Dozens of
screenwriters, actors, directors, musicians, and other entertainment figures were black-listed, the
most famous of whom were the “Hollywood Ten.”
45
46
Futrell, “Seeing Red,” 98.
Futrell, “Seeing Red,” 78.
13 Dalton Trumbo, the screenwriter for Spartacus and the most famous (or infamous) of the
“Hollywood Ten” had joined the Communist Party in 1943. From 1947 on, he was forbidden to
work on any entertainment project. Using the humorously subversive pseudonym Robert Rich,
Trumbo continued to work in entertainment anyway (and illegally), actually winning the best
screenplay award in the 1957 film The Brave One under his false name. As the behind-the-scenes
screenwriter for Spartacus, Trumbo was not allowed to be present at the set or on location during
the shooting. By 1960, though, the blacklist was being publicly denounced, even by major
figures such as former President Harry S. Truman, whose administration had seen the launching
of the blacklists.47 The question of whether to end the blacklist was a live issue in the 1960
Presidential election. Kirk Douglas, whose “open secret” was that his Bryna Productions used
blacklisted writers, had even met with Vice President Richard Nixon to discuss whether the
Eisenhower administration would look kindly on using a blacklisted writer openly. Spartacus
would be the first film to name a blacklisted writer, Trumbo, in its credits, a fact which strikes at
the core of the film’s message and its own particular invocation of (and contribution to) the
legend of Spartacus.
Trumbo’s communism is not in question, and socialist themes in the movie are clear
enough in retrospect and with analysis. Trumbo once even explicitly claimed that he used the
parallel between the conflict between Stalin and Trotsky as a model for a conflict between
Spartacus and another gladiator named Crixus in the film:
Let us remember that the conflict between Stalin and Trotsky was more dramatic than the
conflict between, let us say, Lenin and the Tsar. Why, because Stalin and Trotsky had the
same objective, while Lenin and the Tsar had different objectives. Because war between
brothers is more dramatic and tragic than any other kind. . . . The way I have written the
part is this: Spartacus and Crixus share the same goal (freedom). They differ as to how
they may reach their goal (escape via Brundisium versus the capture of Rome). Their
47
Futrell, “Seeing Red,” 98.
14 conflict is of the highest moral order, it is a classic tragedy. Spartacus [ultimately] is
compelled to execute Crixus for the good of the whole . . .
In the end, Spartacus’ revolt fails, in Trumbo’s telling, because of the overpowering strength of
Rome which, like a modern capitalist juggernaut, kept the glorious socialist revolution from
ultimate success. The quotation above, though, is very telling with Trumbo’s essential
“justification of Stalin’s purge of the Old Bolsheviks in order to preserve unity by referring to the
assassination of Trotsky as the dramatic result of a conflict between two brothers who basically
shared the same goals but espoused conflicting strategies to reach them.”48 Such themes are there
in Spartacus, although necessarily more muted.
Trumbo clearly considered the risks: “If the film had failed, neither I nor any other
blacklisted writer would ever have been able to work again.”49 He necessarily down-played, but
kept as much as possible, the themes which inspired him, the themes inherent in his fellow
Communist and blacklisted writer Fast’s novel. In an interview with David Chandler, Trumbo
shows his full awareness of the risks:
Chandler: I thought you were very bold in Spartacus.
Trumbo: Well, I thought I was very restrained . . . because I realized that the thing which
any other writer would say and would never be thought of or analyzed or would never be
significant or noticed, when I say it, it becomes highly significant—smuggling in
propaganda and doing all sorts of things, so you see I consider this a very mild script.50
The artistic visions behind the film were often in conflict, with Kirk Douglas often on one
side and the young Stanley Kubrick on the other. In fact, director Kubrick and Douglas became
life-long enemies during the filming. Douglas wanted the film to be about the “eventual
disruption of evil institutions,” often playing up analogies to current American political debates,
while Kubrick wanted to explore the “real” intent of the Spartacus and ambiguity of the
48
Cooper, “Trumbo vs. Kubrick,” 3-4 and 6.
Duncan L. Cooper, “Who Killed Spartacus? How Studio Censorship Nearly Ruined the Braveheart of the 1960s,”
The Kubrick Site, http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0102.html, 5.
50
Winkler, Spartacus, 22.
49
15 gladiators.51 The director of Universal Studies at the time, Ed Muhl, appreciated the analogies to
current American political debates paraded safely in 2,000 year old dress, but took a pragmatic
line: “Deep ideas are nice to have in a picture. But what counts is audience appeal.”52 Kubrick
would later come to disavow the film: “The only film [of mine] that I don’t like is Spartacus.”53
Each of these creative forces lost some battles, and won others, ultimately producing what some
film critics consider a muddled plot, or in the words of Bosley Crowther in the New York Times,
“A romantic mishmash.”54
Meanwhile, public opinion was beginning to shift against the blacklists, as evidenced by
debates in the 1960 Presidential election; Spartacus boldly went where films were forbidden to
go in its apparent critiques of central American values and institutions, such as private property
and organized religion. In the film, as the slave revolt spreads, the slaves are often shown
depriving the Roman aristocrats of their wealth and distributing it evenly among the slave band.
Marx’s dictum “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” might well
serve as a subtheme of the film. The film is quite intentional in showing all the members of the
band sharing equally in the profits. In one particularly explicit scene, the slaves line up and dump
all captured objects of value into a central space where they will be distributed equally among
all. The sympathies of the producers were clearly with the slave army as it plundered the wealth
of the Rome’s aristocratic class, vividly portrayed. The audience was expected to sympathize
with the seizure of private property, a situation unthinkable in American theaters since 1947.
Organized religion also appeared as a target in the film. In one telling interchange
between the fictional composite character Gracchus, the leader of the populist faction in Rome’s
51
Futrell, “Seeing Red,” 98.
Cooper, “Who Killed Spartacus,” 5.
53
Winkler, Spartacus, 4.
54
“Screen: Spartacus Enters the Arena,” The New York Times, October 7, 1960, Entertainment Section, 28.
52
16 civil struggle, and a young Julius Caesar, Caesar says to the populist Gracchus, “I thought you
had reservations about the gods.” Gracchus, readying himself for a sacrifice, breezily replies,
“Privately, I believe in none of them—neither do you. Publicly, I believe in them all.” Gracchus
faithfully carries out his religious duties, but the episode presents a risky point to a modern
audience, even if safely relegated to the distant past: Organized public religion is a mere
political tool among Rome’s (and America’s) best and brightest.
Selling a Socialist Spartacus
But the central question yet remains—how did a film with such a socialist and Marxist
pedigree manage to become such a blockbuster in 1961? How did the film keep from falling
afoul of the Defense of the American Way, which was vigilantly dedicated to the “protection of
quintessentially American values from forces hostile to them. To challenge or critique property
rights of the individual, organized religion, and other bulwarks of American society, was to take
an ‘un-American’ stance.”55
A first answer must be found in the way that the film treats the fundamental American
theme of freedom, a surprisingly malleable concept. As Alison Futrell puts it, “The meaning of
‘freedom’ in this context could thus be understood in different ways by different audiences. The
character of Spartacus is layered in multiple, sometimes conflicted meanings.”56 The film was
billed as a celebration of the “age-old fight for freedom,” its makeshift gladiatorial army
appealing to American archetypes of a rag-tag band of stalwarts standing up to tyrants. But who
was who? The character Spartacus can be interpreted as a “sincere and pure” American defying
all odds in his fight for freedom against the juggernaut of a foreign totalitarian state. In this case,
55
56
Futrell, “Seeing Red,” 78.
Futrell, “Seeing Red,” 77.
17 Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, of recent or fairly recent memory, stand in as the obvious
modern analogies. “The age of the dictator was at hand, waiting in the shadows for the event to
bring it forth” declares the film’s authoritative opening voice-over. The “Sword and Sandal”
genre had made analogies between the oppressive tyranny of Rome and modern totalitarian
states a mainstay.57 The film’s souvenir booklet claimed it was about “a man who led an inspired
crusade for freedom and against the most powerful state on earth, defeating in bloody battle nine
of its best trained armies.”58
Yet, the question of who was freedom fighter and who was tyrant in corresponding
modern analogies was not so straightforward in a way it had been for previous “Swords and
Sandals.” Undoubtedly, for screenwriter Trumbo and consultant Fast, HUAC and McCarthy
were at least in part playing the oppressive Roman tyrant to the persecuted freedom-fighter
entertainment artists. Parts of the film can easily be interpreted (and have been) as statements of
solidarity with blacklisted screenwriters protesting the perceived intrusive power of the
American state. In one scene, the conservative Senator Crassus delivers to the populist Senator
Gracchus the ominous line, “Arrests are in progress. The prisons begin to fill. In every city and
province, lists of the disloyal have been compiled. Tomorrow, they will learn the cost of their
terrible folly . . . their treason.” Most Americans probably thought immediately of recent
Stalinist purges. But for the likes of Fast and Trumbo, both of whom had served time in prison
thanks to such “lists of the disloyal,” the film proclaimed a rather different meaning. The
contemporary application of protest of blacklisting and censorship of artists can hardly be missed
now.
57
See the excellent presentations on this topic for Quo Vadis and Ben-Hur in Cyrino, Big Screen Rome, 27-30 and
83-87.
58
Winkler, Spartacus, 40.
18 The film’s most famous, indeed iconic, line demonstrates further the ambiguous layering
of the concept of freedom. After the final battle, the surviving members of the defeated slave
army are rounded up and seated on a hillside. Senator Crassus, who does not know what
Spartacus looks like, demands that they turn over their leader, living or dead, in return for their
own lives. As Spartacus slowly starts to stand, and thus, save the members of his band from
certain death, they suddenly stand up individually as each defiantly declares, even shouts, “I’m
Spartacus.” Soon, a deafening chorus of “I’m Spartacus” confronts the confused and enraged
Senator. The moment is easily the most famous scene from all of the Sword and Sandal films
(and brilliantly skewered in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”). But what exactly is being
celebrated here? Is this a statement of how freedom-loving Americans must stick together in the
“age of the dictator” and not betray the sacred cause of freedom? Is it, as one critic has
suggested, “an American expression of human brotherhood regardless of any specific political
convictions.”59 Or is it a stirring tribute to artists who collectively and in solidarity suffered
under and defied the HUAC blacklist? In the analysis of Maria Wyke,“as the camera focuses first
on Crassus, perplexed by their behavior, and then on Spartacus, moved to tears, as the musical
theme rises to a stirring crescendo, the sequence insists not on the virtue of incriminating, but
rather on the heroism of shielding the subversive within.”60 It is hard not to see elements of all of
these, with the former two appealing specifically to a broad American audience and helping sell
the film. The stirring moment, though, must be read, in part, in terms of Spartacus
historiography: “The surviving gladiators, when asked to betray Spartacus to save their
individual lives, respond by affirming their group loyalty . . . now they share a single identity, a
59
60
Winkler, “Holy Cause,” 177.
Wyke, Projecting, 67.
19 single name: Spartacus. The collective identity transcends the individual.”61 It is a
cinematographic moment the Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg likely would certainly have
enjoyed thoroughly—a true Spartakusbund.
One of the most brilliantly executed sections of the film is a set of speeches juxtaposed in
montage form. Conservative Senator Crassus is giving a speech in Rome at the same time
Spartacus is giving one to his army out in the countryside near the sea. Parts of each speech are
delivered back and forth over several minutes of the film. Crassus emphasizes might, control,
and order, while Spartacus emphasizes freedom, with, again, a particular twist:
Crassus: I promise you a new Rome, a new Italy, and a new empire. I promise the
destruction of the slave army and the restoration of order throughout all our territories.
Spartacus: I’d rather be here, a free man among brothers, facing a long march and a hard
fight, than to be the richest citizen in Rome, fat with food he didn’t work for and
surrounded by slaves.
As here, the film often treats freedom and property rights in a similarly ambiguous and even
ambivalent way. The opening voice-over has a not-so-subtle line which likewise casts private
property in a negative light, yet in a way that could actually appeal broadly to an American
audience circa 1960. Although it is well known that Spartacus was born free and even served in
the Roman army before becoming enslaved, the voice-over invents a very different origin story,
and spins the tale to obvious ends. The birth of Spartacus is described thus: “an illiterate slave
woman added to her master’s wealth by giving birth to a son whom she named Spartacus”
(italics mine). Spartacus’ birth, then, is told inaccurately and disparagingly in terms of crass
private property production, property gained without any actual work. And who in the 1950s
would be supportive of slavery? The account of the birth is deliberately anti-historical and
presented in such a way as to set the stage for further critiques of private property throughout the
film and in a way which could actually garner Cold War audience sympathy.
61
Futrell, “Seeing Red,” 109.
20 Just as is the story of his birth, the story of Spartacus’ death is likewise invented in the
film in order to make a vivid point about freedom. The ending solidifies Spartacus as a
Messianic figure dying for what Alison Futrell calls “The Holy Cause of Freedom.” The ancient
sources are unanimous that Spartacus died in battle and his body was never found. The film,
however, ends powerfully with Spartacus dying on a cross to make his own child as well as,
ultimately, all bound men, free. The scene is vital to the movie, but this version of his death
appears in no Western rendition of the Spartacus tale, not even Fast’s novel. The supreme irony
(or is it?) is that the only place that such imagery could be found was in Soviet school books of
the 1950s and early 1960s, which “portrayed the dying Spartacus as a substitute for Christ
crucified.”62 Were Americans so enamored of their “Holy Cause of Freedom” that they could be
expected to even overlook the socialist/Marxist elements of the film? One can almost hear in
one’s head as the film closes, “As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.” None
of this need to imply subversion, conspiracy, or insincerity—Douglas seems to have really
believed in his cause, and to have really believed that the blacklists were a violation of
Americans’ “Holy Cause of Freedom.”
The film also sold its powerful ideas specifically through its distinct historical setting.
Americans have, since the colonial era, ascribed a certain dignitas and auctoritas to Roman
antiquity, particularly the late Roman Republican period, which had long served as a cautionary
tale of a fundamentally good system plagued by over-ambitious and greedy men. The late
Roman Republic was, in short, a safe setting for playing with potentially dangerous modern
political ideas. Again, though, the sense is ambivalent—the major late Roman Republican
figures, Senator Crassus and the fictional composite Senator Gracchus, each show the dark sides
of Roman (and, by obvious analogy, American) politics. The political Right (Crassus) and Left
62
Winkler, “Holy Cause,” 183.
21 (Gracchus) are both skillfully skewered throughout the film (although it must be noted that the
political Left personified by Gracchus comes off looking much more endearing, even if still
rather disgusting). So is the film simply a counter-cultural critique of the Roman Republic?
Ostensibly, the film critiques the excesses of the Roman Republic out of control in its addiction
to slavery and other vices. The figure of Julius Caesar (played by heartthrob John Gavin), with
his smooth Midwestern American accent (as opposed to all the corrupt politicians with
unambiguously British, imperial accents63) presents the hope of the future. Rome is not the
problem, but rather those who abuse their power. Kirk Douglas could thus tap into Western
traditions going back to the American and French Revolutions to romanticize both the Roman
Republic and Spartacus as symbols of “the natural right to freedom,” something a plagued
Republic was failing to address properly.
Finally, the film sold by connecting with a certain strand of American agrarian
communalism which at times bordered on a socialist utopia as envisioned by Howard Fast. Many
film critics have noted that as the slave army moves about the Italian countryside, Spartacus
stands in as the father of the band. He appears often in small, intimate, almost nuclear family size
gatherings, playing the father figure and the guardian of home, his wife Varinia, and gathered
slaves standing in as surrogate children. He is alternatively shown, George Washington-like, as
the fearless father of his “country”—masses of young and old men and women as well as
children following his lead against incredible odds. The specific strand of agrarian communalism
would appeal to Americans on all sides of the political aisle with its prizing of the natural and
simple against the bureaucratized and even mechanized forces of urban civilization. Domestic
63
On the very intentional use of British vs. American accents in Sword and Sandal films (as well as, later, in the Star
Wars series, etc.), the so-called “linguistic paradigm,” see Cyrino, Big Screen Rome, 28, passim.
22 chords would certainly have been struck with the poem recited in the midst of one of the smaller,
more intimate gathering of the slave “family.”
When the blazing sun hangs low in the western sky,
when the wind dies away on the mountain,
when the song of the meadowlark turns still,
when the field locust clicks no more in the field,
and the sea foam sleeps like a maiden at rest,
and twilight touches the shape of the wandering earth,
I turn home.
Through blue shadows and purple woods,
I turn home.
I turn to the place that I was born,
to the mother who bore me and the father who taught me,
long ago, long ago, long ago.
Alone am I now, lost and alone, in a far, wide, wandering world.
Yet still when the blazing sun hangs low,
when the wind dies away and the sea foam sleeps,
and twilight touches the wandering earth,
I turn home.
The slave army moves through natural landscapes “to distance the rebels from Roman
city dwellers and to elide the image of communalism with the quintessentially American
symbology of the Western . . . . At the same time, cinematic technique encourages the viewer to
identify the gladiators with nature; truly salt of the earth, they live in man’s original state.”64 The
line between agrarian communalism and an agrarian socialist utopia can be a fine one, another
ambiguity with which the writers are playing in this film. A socialist agrarian utopia was exactly
what Howard Fast envisioned and promoted in his 1951 novel.65
In this growing slave family roaming the countryside yet gathered in the afternoons for
merriment and in the evenings around fire and hearth, the family solidarity theme shines through.
Women can sew and cook, but as one crusty Italian matron declares with blunt but humorous
force, they can fight too. Poets, singers of songs, are needed in the band as well. This agrarian
64
65
Futrell, “Seeing Red,” 106-107.
See MacDonald, Howard Fast, 9.
23 communalism struck a deep chord with Americans. Yet, it should not be missed that all unite
together with a class-consciousness which owes everything to Marx’s rendition of Spartacus, one
which bore no resemblance to any ancient sources.
Conclusion
A “Red Writers are Back!” boycott campaign launched by the National League of
Decency against Spartacus failed, and miserably. Such is, at least in part, a testimony to how
tired Americans had grown of the blacklists and the excesses of McCarthy, by then discredited.
JFK’s public attendance and clear endorsement (“It was fine.”) certainly did not hurt either.
There is, though, far more to the story than that. The film very skillfully appealed to deeply held
American ideologies and a basic longing for human solidarity. Yet it did so in a way that, upon
closer examination, effectively blurred the boundaries between quintessential Americanisms and
(arguably ironic) socialist artist and activist protests against restrictions on free speech and
thought in a free society. The John Birch Society dismissed the film as “well-camouflaged”
Communist propaganda. The socialist message of the film might be subtle, but from a safe
distance of now more than half a century, it hardly seems well-camouflaged. We would also do
well to remember that without Howard Fast’s Marxist parable, indeed without Karl Marx’s
attraction to a little-known late Roman gladiator, it is quite likely that only some of the historical
enthusiasts among us would have ever even heard of Spartacus.
Perhaps the ultimate irony is that a Communist screenwriter using a Marxist novel helped
produce a film which most Americans of the time came to interpret and consume as thoroughly
anti-Communist. One popular press article declared of the film at the time of its release:
Although it deals with a revolt by slaves against the pagan Roman Empire, the desire for
freedom from oppression that motivates Spartacus has its modern counterpart today in areas of
24 the world that struggle under Communist tyranny, and it stands as a sharp reminder for all
mankind that there can be no truly peaceful sleep whilst would-be conquering legions stand
poised to suppress.66
Whether one interprets all this cynically and as thoroughly opportunistic Communists
personally profiting from an ideology they actually despised, or as a more sincere and successful
protest against HUAC’s curtailing of freedom of speech, or perhaps as something else, Spartacus
did break the blacklist forever. And it did usher in yet another stage in the ongoing modern
reconfiguring of the shadowy ancient revolutionary.67 In the brilliant summary of Maria Wyke,
“Spartacus became refigured as a Cold War warrior fighting against the autocracy, atheism, and
state control of the Soviet Union, and his aspirations were assimilated to the alternative, divinely
blessed values of democratic America.”68
Mid twentieth-century novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler was right—“In
Hollywood anything can happen, anything at all.”
66
Variety, 7 October, 1960.
It does not appear he is going away yet, as evidenced by the fairly recent television release of the series,
“Spartacus: Blood and Sand.”
68
Wyke, Projecting, 72.
67
25