Stars: Goran Visnjic, Alan Bates, Angus MacFadyen, Rhona Mitra, James Frain, Ben Cross, Ross Kemp

Director: Robert Dornhelm

Summary: The epic story of a slave who fights for freedom. Set in the time of the Roman Empire in 72 BC, a young boy witnesses his father's murder before becoming a slave to the Rome. Years later he leads a rebellion.

This television production stars Goran Visnjic (ER) as the titular gladiator in this television adaptation of the same 1951 Howard Fast novel that spawned Stanley Kubrick's 1960 film classic. While living out his life as a slave the deserts of Egypt, Spartacus is bought by a trainer of gladiators and forced to fight for the amusement of the Roman masses. There, he spearheads a slave uprising which rocks the very foundations of Rome. Alan Bates co-stars as Lentulas Agrippa in his final screen role.

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Stanley Kubrick was only 31 years old when Kirk Douglas (star of Kubrick's classic Paths of Glory) recruited the young director to pilot this epic saga, in which the rebellious slave Spartacus (played by Douglas) leads a freedom revolt against the ailing Roman Republic and its generals. Kubrick would later disown the film because it was not a personal project--he was merely a director-for-hire--but Spartacusremains one of the best of Hollywood's grand historical epics. With an intelligent screenplay by then-blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo (from a novel by Howard Fast), its liberal message of freedom and civil rights, highly relevant in early-1960s USA, is still quite powerful and the all-star cast (including Charles Laughton in full toga) is full of entertaining surprises.

Restored in 1991 to include scenes deleted from the original 1960 release, the full-length Spartacusis a grand-scale cinematic marvel, offering some of the most awesome battles ever filmed and a central performance by Douglas that's as sensitively emotional as it is intensely heroic. Jean Simmons plays the slave woman who becomes Spartacus's wife, and Peter Ustinov steals the show with his frequently hilarious, Oscar-winning performance as a slave trader who shamelessly curries favour with his Roman superiors. The restored version also includes a formerly deleted bathhouse scene in which Laurence Olivier's patrician Crassus (with restored dialogue dubbed by Anthony Hopkins) gets hot and bothered over a slave servant played by Tony Curtis. These and other restored scenes expand the film to just over three hours in length. Despite some forgivable lulls, this is a rousing and substantial drama that grabs and holds your attention. Breaking tradition with sophisticated themes and a downbeat (yet eminently noble) conclusion, Spartacusis a thinking person's epic, rising above mere spectacle with a story as impressive as its widescreen action and Oscar-winning sets. --Jeff Shannon

Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Year:	2004
Release Date:	October 25, 2004
Runtime:	167 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	822 685 1
Keywords:	General, Spartacus, Tv, Drama, Historical
Genre:	Drama