The New Pictures

Spartacus (Bryna Productions; Universal-International) is a new kind of Hollywood movie: a superspectacle with spiritual vitality and moral force. Quality, of course, is not permitted to inhibit quantity. Shot in a widescreen, full-color process known as Super-Technirama 70. Spartacus runs for 3 hr. 25 min., including a brief intermission, employs 100 major sets, 8,000 extras and far more big names than most marquees can carry--among them Kirk Douglas. Sir Laurence Olivier, Jean Simmons, Charles Laughton. Peter

Ustinov, Tony Curtis, John Gavin, Nina Foch, John Dall, Herbert Lorn, John Ireland. Even in reserved-seat release at advanced prices ($1-50-$3.50 ), the movie will have to run for at least a year before it returns an investment ($12 million) that comes close to matching the average annual revenue of the Roman Republic in the time of Spartacus.

Spartacus, hailed by Plutarch as a man "in understanding and gentleness superior to his condition," was the leader of a band of 78 slaves who in the year 73 B.C. escaped from a training school for gladiators at Capua, 130 miles south of Rome. Eluding the Roman garrison, the gladiators stole weapons, pillaged estates, and freed thousands of slaves (who then made up four-fifths of the population of Rome). After two years of revolt, during which he defeated nine armies sent against him by the Roman Senate, Spartacus commanded a force of 90,000, cavalry and foot. Emboldened by their victories, his men finally forced him to fight a pitched battle against the main body of the Roman army, commanded by Crassus. In the unequal fight Spartacus himself was cut to pieces, the slave army finally destroyed, and its 6,000 survivors crucified along the Appian Way.

In all ages since, Spartacus has been revered as the patron saint of revolutions. In this century the Communists have claimed him, and both Howard Fast (now an ex-Communist) and Arthur Koestler (now an antiCommunist) have written historical novels about the heroic slave. The script of this picture--based on Fast's book and written by longtime Far Leftist Dalton Trumbo, whose name until recently led the Hollywood blacklist--plays Fast and loose with the historical facts.

Crassus, actually only a competitor for the consulship while Spartacus was on the loose, is presented as the Dictator of Rome. To compound the cinematic crime, Caesar, the empire builder, is portrayed by Actor Gavin, a rose-lipped, sloe-eyed young man who looks as though he never got to the first conjugation, let alone the Gallic Wars. And Antoninus, a Roman poet, is played by Actor Curtis with an accent which suggests that the ancient Tiber was a tributary of the Bronx River. To these blunders is added the customary quota of glaring goofs (a map of Italy that looks like nothing seen in Rome before the 19th century), slobbery sentiment ("Be gentle with me. I'm going to have a baby"), a generous helping of cheesecake (Actress Simmons takes a bath in which she womanfully breasts the waves), and barrels of bright red, fresh-from-the-paint-can blood.

For all its bows to the bankers, Spartacus is a peculiarly impressive piece of moviemaking. Director Stanley Kubrick, 32, shows mastery in all departments: cast, camera and cutting. In intimate scenes his camera follows the action with delicacy and precision; but he also knows when to let the frame stand grandly still and the audience stare, as if through a huge picture window, at a magnificent landscape or a ponderous ballet of legions that precedes a battle.

As might be expected, Olivier makes a memorable Crassus, emerging as a voluptuary of power, a moral idiot whose only feelings are in his skin; and Laughton picks the ham bone clean as the jolly demagogue Gracchus, a figure as hilarious and frightening as Khrushchev in a bed sheet. Even wooden-faced Hero Douglas is inspired by Kubrick's direction, and perhaps by his own authority as producer of the picture, to achieve a certain consistency of obviousness that, without actual characterization, nevertheless suggests a character.

Much as it owes to Kubrick, Spartacus owes even more to its script, which Scenarist Trumbo has adorned with humor, eloquence, sophistication and a corrosive irony. Above all, despite his personal predilection for the 20th century's most crushing political orthodoxy, Trumbo has imparted to Spartacus a passion for freedom and the men who live and die for it --a passion that transcends all politics and persons in the fearful, final image of the dying gladiator, the revolutionary on the cross.

Midnight Lace (Universal-International) is another of those recurrent thrillers (Sorry, Wrong Number, Gaslight, The Two Mrs. Carrolls, Julie) in which a dear, sweet, innocent girl is pursued by a shadowy figure of evil who threatens her with all sorts of insidious molestation and who generally turns out to be "No! No! Not YOU!" Like its predecessors. Midnight Lace is not very interesting in itself, but it is uncomfortably fascinating when considered as one of the persistent fantasies of a monogamous society.

In this instance the woman is an American heiress (Doris Day) who has just married a British industrialist (Rex Harrison). One day, in that London fog the thriller business can't seem to find its way out of, the heroine is addressed by a queer, high, male voice that sputters obscenities at her and then threatens to murder her within a month. Soon after that she has a brush with a falling girder. Then a tall, dark stranger looms at her bedroom window. Then somebody pushes her in front of a bus. And so on till the tension has her ready for the funny farm. False leads trail off in at least seven directions, but the climax of the film will come to most mystery buffs as no surprise.

Credits: the screen play, by Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts, is competent. The Eastman Color is pleasant. Rex Harrison is smooth and plausible. Doris Day wears a lot of expensive clothes, and in attempting to portray the all-American missus behaves like such a silly, spoiled, hysterical, middle-aged Lolita that many customers may find themselves less in sympathy with her plight than with the villain's murderous intentions.

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