Spartacus: Film and History, and: Troy: From Homer’s ‘Iliad’ to Hollywood Epic (review)

The cinema was enamoured with the ancient world almost at birth. Since Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914) that world has been the setting for many of the industry’s most ambitious productions. The legendary expensiveness of Joseph L. Manckiewicz’s Cleopatra (1963) indeed almost killed the genre, but computer-generated imagery has given it a new lease on life by making the spectacle easier to manage and manipulate. Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000) was an international success and rekindled the flame, and Zack Snyder’s 300 (2007; on the battle of Thermopylae) has confirmed that classical antiquity can still be box office magic. Such efforts often make a claim on historical authenticity as a selling point; sometimes considerable research has gone into them, and high-profile scholarly advisors have occasionally been recruited (Kathleen Coleman for Gladiator, Robin Lane Fox for Oliver Stone’s Alexander, 2004). Yet the moviemakers have of course felt perfectly free to ignore the record when it suited their purpose to do so, as has fairly often been the case in matters both small and large (Gladiator appears to end with the reestablishment of the Roman republic in 192 AD), and academic dealings with these films have always had a special strain of annoyance and sarcasm to them. Winkler, himself a professor of Classics, has been an important figure in trying to stimulate other classicists to get past the attitude (never entirely past it, to be sure) and bring the resources and habits of their scholarship and critical method to bear in more sophisticated ways on this significant component to one of the major art forms of our time. Winkler likes the term ‘film philology’. In practice this involves a vigorous, sometimes archival inquisitiveness about everything that went into the making, marketing, and reception of these movies (the handling of ancient material being only one element here), as well as a receptive interest in how they work, or are meant to work, both as cinema and as interventions in the popular culture of their time. In 2004 Winkler orchestrated a collection of new essays on Gladiator; the success of that volume has now prompted similar efforts on two other Hollywood blockbusters: Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960) and Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004).

On Spartacus there is already a critical tradition of some note, both because of Kubrick’s name on the project – he was a very unusual choice to direct something like this – and because of its provocative politics; most of the discussion in Winkler’s volume is related to the latter. The most common note is disappointment that a film based on a novel by an avowed Marxist and scripted by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo was not as politically incendiary as it could have been. The most emphatic such statement comes in the volume’s most substantial single essay, where film scholar Duncan Cooper offers a detailed reconstruction, based on a good deal of information available only through his efforts, of the movie’s troubled production history (almost as messy as Cleopatra’s, though less glamorous). Cooper is revising and expanding his important 1991 article in Cinéaste; new research and interviews have led him to shift his attention from conflicts among the strong personalities working on the film itself – Kubrick, Trumbo, and Kirk Douglas, who played Spartacus and was the driving force in getting the film made – to studio pressure to tone down the sense that the slave revolt presented a serious threat to Rome. Cooper sees that pressure as working in the direction of what Trumbo angrily called ‘Small Spartacus’ – as opposed to the more heroic and dangerous ‘Large Spartacus’ in which the rebellion from below almost succeeded. The result is among other things a distinct narrative muddle in the film’s second hour; Cooper now has an ingenious proposal for partly repairing it...