Spartacus

Intro by Rodney F. Hill, author of The Encyclopedia of Stanley Kubrick, Mon Mar 25 at 8:30! DCP projection

“Successfully sweeps us back to an era when machismo had soul… As Spartacus, the slave gladiator who leads a rebellion against the Roman empire, Douglas is a fearless, baby-blue-eyed messiah who loves his fellow underdogs like brothers… Like Lawrence of Arabia, Spartacus seems to teeter between eras, fusing the moral and visual clarity of classic movie epics — scenes of carnage, squalor, and political revolt transformed into widescreen eye candy — with dashes of contemporary knowingness, most notably in the superb, slyly mordant performances of Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, and Peter Ustinov. The one scene with a hint of the eccentrically detached brilliance that would come to define ‘Stanley Kubrick Movies’ is the climactic battle, in which marching blocks of Roman soldiers are mowed down by fire: It’s war as the greatest halftime show ever choregraphed. Until then, SPARTACUS envelops you in the sort of bedazzled hero worship Hollywood never quite managed to bring off this rousingly again.” -Entertainment Weekly