Spartacus

On the same day that Trumbo opens in theaters, celebrating the life of Dalton Trumbo, we pay our own tribute to the blacklisted screenwriter, along with Kirk Douglas and director Stanley Kubrick, with this 55th anniversary screening of their Oscar-winning film, Spartacus. The picture, adapted from Howard Fast’s novel about a slave revolt in ancient Rome, is generally regarded as “the best-paced and most slyly entertaining of all the decadent-ancient-Rome spectacular films,” as critic Pauline Kael wrote. Douglas, the producer as well as star of the film, decided to break the blacklist by allowing Trumbo to use his own name on the screenplay for the first time in more than a decade.

The all-star cast includes Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, Jean Simmons, Tony Curtis, Woody Strode, and Peter Ustinov, who won the Academy Award for best supporting actor for his droll performance as a sycophantic slave dealer. (The film also won Oscars for cinematography, art direction, and costume design.) See this grand, thrilling sand-and-sandals epic—a precursor of Ridley Scott’s Oscar-winning Gladiator—on the big screen, in a brand new restoration.