Hollywood Codebreakers: ‘Spartacus’ Breaks the Blacklist
Spartacus shouldn’t have been in the arena. He shouldn’t have been in gladiator school to begin with. A surly slave sentenced to die for biting his master, Spartacus was spared and selected for training through a chance encounter — and his dumb luck would save him yet again in this battle with Draba, a formidable opponent from Ethiopia.
Draba had disarmed Spartacus just a minute into their fight, trapping him between his trident prongs with no hope of escape. But as Spartacus closed his eyes and waited for the steel to pierce his throat, Draba had second thoughts. He turned towards the senator who had bought them, who was watching them fight for their lives with his bored, wealthy companions. Draba hurled his trident into their balcony, furiously scaling the wall so he could kill the senator himself. But his act of rebellion was cut short by a guard’s spear to his back — and, seconds later, a knife across his neck. The senator delivered that blow personally.
When Spartacus returns to his quarters at the gladiator school, he sees Draba’s lifeless body strung up in the hall, a grim reminder of the price of defiance. But this display has the opposite of its intended effect on Spartacus, who carries Draba’s revolutionary spirit with him as he leads a mass slave revolt that shakes Rome to its core.
The strange thing about this galvanizing moment is that Draba’s corpse isn’t especially bloody. All his limbs are intact, and he’s even earned the dignity of a loincloth and sandals. This was not a small charity from the Roman ruling class, but a mandate from the PCA censors, who struggled over two years to make the violent, semi-naked, and extremely bisexual epic Spartacus less violent, naked, and bisexual. While they scored some concessions, Spartacus was still a revolutionary movie for 1960, one that continued to erode Production Code standards to dust and effectively ended the Hollywood blacklist.
Spartacus was a passion project for Kirk Douglas, who had started his own production company in 1955. Two years into business, Douglas’s producing partner Eddie Lewis handed him a copy of Spartacus, insisting they option it for film. The historical novel told a fictionalized version of the life of Spartacus, a rebellious gladiator in ancient Rome who helped kickstart a massive slave uprising. The tale had captivated many writers and thinkers over the years, but it held particular resonance for author Howard Fast, who became obsessed with Spartacus while he was serving time in federal prison.
In 1950, Fast was hauled before the House of Un-American Activities Committee and asked to name names — specifically, the names of donors to an anti-fascist, anti-Franco group he supported during World War II. HUAC was convinced this organization was a communist hotbed, so when Fast refused, he was charged with contempt of Congress. The sentence was three months in jail.
Fast knew that his career would be different on the blacklist. Publishers would avoid anything he wrote, at least under his real name, so he established his own imprint to push Spartacus out. He called it the Blue Heron Press, a riff on his friend’s cheeky suggestion that he name the company Red Herring Press.
Douglas, meanwhile, was fresh off his Nordic epic The Vikings and apparently still in a swashbuckling mood. His production company took on Spartacus, with Douglas in the star role and Universal distributing. While many in Hollywood were still wary of blacklisted writers at the time, Douglas was so unperturbed that he hired another man on the list to adapt the screenplay: Dalton Trumbo, a member of the Hollywood Ten.
Production on Spartacus stalled many times as the men involved wrestled for creative control. Director Anthony Mann quit out of frustration, and was replaced with Stanley Kubrick, Douglas’s director on Paths of Glory. He and Trumbo clashed. Douglas got the flu. And as the budget climbed to $12 million, the cast and crew ordered an “anniversary cake” to celebrate one endless year of production.
The PCA sent back copious notes on the script, calling attention to a few major points of contention. One was the killing and display of Draba, which Geoffrey Shurlock worried would be “excessively gruesome.” He urged Universal to exercise restraint in his slaying, and reminded the studio to keep the dead guy covered up. “As previously mentioned, the corpse should not be hanging nude,” Shurlock wrote on February 11, 1959. “This is important.”
The skinny dipping was another issue. Shurlock warned Universal repeatedly that “scenes of men and women swimming in the nude will be unacceptable,” calling particular attention to a sequence where Varinia (Jean Simmons), Spartacus’s companion, bathes in a pond. He was equally concerned about her nudity in her first scene with Spartacus, where she’s offered to him as a prize for good behavior. The leering men in the cell over didn’t help matters. Neither did Spartacus’s admission, “I’ve never had a woman.”
Shurlock also ordered Universal to remove a shot where a soldier’s arm is cut off and spurts blood, and to shorten the scene where a man drowns in a tub of soup. A suicide near the end of the film would have to be more implicit. But the most well-known bit of Spartacus censorship concerns snails and oysters. The villainous Crassus (Laurence Olivier) has a loaded conversation about these mollusks with his slave Antoninus (Tony Curtis), as he takes a bath. It goes like this:
Crassus: Do you eat oysters?
Antoninus: When I have them, master.
Crassus: Do you eat snails?
Antoninus: No, master.
Crassus: Do you consider the eating of oysters to be moral, and the eating of snails to be immoral?
Antoninus: No, master.
Crassus: Of course not. It is all a matter of taste.
Antoninus: Yes, master.
Crassus: And taste is not the same as appetite, and therefore, not a question of morals, is it?
Antoninus: It could be argued so, master.
Crassus: My robe, Antoninus. My taste includes both snails and oysters.
Shurlock knew what they were really talking about, and warned Universal that “any implication that Crassus is a sex pervert will be unacceptable.” He and the studio went back and forth on this scene so many times that at one point, Lewis suggested they change the innuendo to another food. “It is possible (although they will not say for certain) that they would pass the scene if we substituted ‘artichokes’ and ‘truffles’ for ‘oysters’ and ‘snails,’” he wrote to Douglas.
But Douglas wasn’t willing to compromise and because of that, he got blindsided. In one of his many books, I Am Spartacus, the actor/producer claims Universal made 42 cuts without his permission — including the snail and oysters scene. The moment where Crassus slits Draba’s neck was gone, and the censors also snipped at least “two shots of Jean Simmons completely nude,” keeping Hollywood’s major female stars clothed for another couple years.
The Legion of Decency rated Spartacus an A-III, morally unobjectionable for adults, once the PCA scissored some of the violence. But there was still the matter of the script credit. While Trumbo had never stopped writing, he hadn’t used his real name on a script in a decade. He’d won two Oscars in that time, statues he couldn’t collect because he’d used pseudonyms or asked a friend to take the credit instead. Initially, it looked like he would continue that trend with Spartacus. Throughout the production, Trumbo had submitted new pages under the name Sam Jackson, but rumors were circulating in the press about Jackson’s true identity. As late as June 1960, Trumbo would not verify or comment on “reports that he is the screenwriter of Spartacus,” but he was being unusually candid about his career, even claiming ownership for the scripts he’d secretly written in the 1950s. As Trumbo told Variety in a piece about his “blacklist bonanza,” he felt the anti-communist climate in Hollywood was finally changing. “Everybody used to say: ‘Why don’t you spill everything and end all this trouble,’” he explained. “I haven’t heard this recently. As a matter of fact, it hasn’t happened in quite a while.”
He was also feeling emboldened thanks to Otto Preminger, the director of the forthcoming Trumbo epic Exodus. Preminger openly admitted he hired the blacklisted writer, welcoming him to the set in Jerusalem and promising him full screen credit. According to his book, Douglas wasn’t sure about Trumbo’s credit until June, after the writer threatened to walk. He hesitated to tell Lewis and Kubrick about the decision, though his doubts vanished after Kubrick suggested putting his name on the script. In August, newspapers reported that Trumbo would receive sole screen credit for Spartacus and — since the movie would beat Exodus by a few months — Universal would be the first major studio to give credit to a blacklisted writer. (Preminger was obviously a little pissed.)
Members of the American Legion and other anti-communist groups picketed outside theaters showing Spartacus, but the movie didn’t need their business. It made its first million before Christmas, and modern sources now put its box office total at $60 million. That haul included a ticket from newly inaugurated president John F. Kennedy. The commander-in-chief made headlines when he “drove through the rain and snow” to see the movie on February 3, 1961, at a theater a few blocks from the White House. He later called it one of his favorite films.
Spartacus became the rare Code movie that was able to undo the PCA’s work many years after the fact. In 1991, Universal undertook a massive restoration of the film for theatrical rerelease and home video. The editors found reels containing footage rejected by the PCA, and decided to add them back into the film. This included the old snails and oysters scene, whose visuals were still very much intact. The audio, however, was totally unusable. Curtis was 66 by that point, but he was willing to redub his lines. Olivier was, unfortunately, dead. So Universal hired Anthony Hopkins to do his best impression of the British actor. That’s who you’ll hear when you rent Spartacus or simply watch the clip on YouTube today — and if you have any doubts, just stick around for the credits, where Hopkins receives a special thanks.
Next week, we’ll discuss a director who operated on the fringes of Hollywood. Roger Corman rarely made the kind of polished, “important” films the PCA screened for mainstream release, but he broke his own mold with The Intruder, a drama about a violent racist agitating against school integration. Despite good reviews and a reluctant PCA approval, it was the only Corman movie to ever lose money, and it convinced the director to never attempt anything like it again. We’ll discuss William Shatner’s terrifying turn next week on Hollywood Codebreakers.
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