The Slave: Son of Spartacus

In my review for The Tartars, I explained a bit about what a "peplum" was.  With Hollywood epics such as Samson and Delilah making bank at the box office, Italian film producers wanted to get into the action and started producing their own sword and sandle pictures that were popularly known as peplum films, named after a type of tunic worn by ancient Romans and Greeks.  These movies were usually made relatively inexpensively, and weren't necessarily critical darlings, but they were a popular sub-genre, especially for teenaged boys.  Sometimes a Hollywood star was even lured to Italy to star in one of these films; for example, Kirk Douglas in Ulysses.  And while Ulysses did fairly well in the American box office, peplum films still rarely made it across the ocean.

That all changed in 1958, when American actor and bodybuilder Steve Reeves was brought to Italy to star as Hercules.  The film was a huge hit in Europe, but then American producer Joseph E. Levine bought the distribution rights and released it in the United States.  The result was a huge box office smash and the peplum genre was suddenly all the rage.  Dozens of peplum movies were released in the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and lots of them proved to be really successful.

Hollywood studios even tried to get in on the act - which is how that monstrosity The Tartars was produced.  Geez, I really hate that movie.  And to be honest, I was sort of dreading watching The Slave: Son of Spartacus because of my experience with The Tartars.

Like many of the peplum films, The Slave tries to cash in on a famous Hollywood film - in this case, the classic epic Spartacus, starring Kirk Douglas and directed by Stanley Kubrick.  Spartacus is the true story of the slave revolt that almost brought Rome to its knees in 71 BCE.  The film was the biggest blockbuster hit of the year, and Italian director Sergio Corbucci quickly jumped on the bandwagon to produce his own version (and possibly even an unofficial sequel?).  I can only imagine the lawsuits that would happen today, but I guess in the 1960s, I guess you could sneak by!

The Slave picks up the story 25 years after Spartacus' defeat, and follows the adventures of Randus (Reeves), one of Julius Caesar's finest soldiers.  Caesar has just defeated the Egyptian army, but just when he should be celebrating victory, he senses betrayal among his Roman allies - namely, the wealthy Crassus who rules the Eastern portions of the Empire from Syria. Caesar sends Randus and his lieutenants Beroz (Franco Balducci) and Lumonius (Roland Bartrop) to spy on Crassus, but during a storm, Randus dives off his ship to rescue a beautiful slave girl named Saïde (Ombretta Coli) who had fallen off.  The ship sails off without them.  After swimming to shore, Randus and Saïde are captured by slave traders.  Through a series of silly coincidences that I don't want to ruin, Randus discovers he is actually the son of the legendary Spartacus.  The conflicted Randus must now struggle between his loyalty to Caesar and taking charge of the brewing slave revolt in Syria.

Okay, let's get this out of the way.  The Slave: Son of Spartacus isn't winning any awards.  Expectations need to be clear about what you are getting with this film.  This is not Kubrick and Douglas.  This is a fun, little adventure and weirdly enough, The Slave has more in common with Zorro than Spartacus.  Once Randus embraces his role as the Son of Spartacus, he puts on a disguise and attacks Crassus' men, freeing slaves, destroying supplies and generally just sowing chaos across the region.  After every raid, he even writes a giant "S" on the wall before disappearing.  After his attacks, he takes his helmet off, sneaks back into the palace and professes loyalty to the tyrannical Roman regime.  That's definitely Zorro with a Roman twist.  And it's also all pretty silly.

And yet...it is also a pretty good time.  The Slave knows exactly what it is - a swashbuckling adventure for teenagers, and from that perspective, it's actually not half bad.  Maybe the best way to review this is to directly compare it to The Tartars, the film with the bigger movies stars in Victor Mature and Orson Welles, a veteran director in Richard Thorpe, and certainly a more sizable budget.  Let's start with the acting.  Mature and Welles looked tired and uninterested.  They were there for the paycheck and you could tell.  They act like material is beneath them (and in fairness, it kind of is).  But you don't get that attitude from Reeves, Bartrop, and the other performers in The Slave.  They definitely understand the type of movie they are in, but they still give it everything they've got.  They are trying to entertain, not win Oscars, and there is a certain relish to their performances.

I would like to take a second to compare the sets and the look of the fiml.  With the exception of the exterior scenes shot in Yugoslavia, The Tartars was mostly set bound, and you can tell.  The Khan's palace was a cool set, but it still looked like a set.  And the exterior shot of the fortress was just a giant matte painting - a good matte painting, granted, but still a reminder that nothing in this film feels real.  The Slave, with a fraction of the budget, simply looks better because it is filming mostly in real places, including Egypt.  Randus' initial meeting with Caesar takes place in front of the Sphinx, and the ruined city that the slave army is hiding in is really a ruined city.  All this just adds a sense of authenticity to the film that I wasn't expecting and that I really appreciated.   

We can compare the action sequences, as well.  The Tartars' action scenes were really pretty boring, a bunch of stunt doubles waving fake weapons at each other.  But the action in The Slave is kind of fun.  It helps when the combatants look like they are actually trying to hit each other.   And then you have Steve Reeves himself.  He was cast for his muscles, and not his acting chops.  His performance is a bit stiff and stilted, and he isn't the most charismatic leading man in the world.  But then he picks up a sword and flexes those biceps - and wow, this guy looks really good fighting.  Forget the stunt man, Steve Reeves is all in!  And I was digging it.  

And I think it is important to note that Steve Reeves really was a trailblazer in many ways.  Maybe his acting wasn't the best, but he worked hard and became an action star and his physicality truly makes an impression.  He paved the way for future massive musclemen to become stars.  Without Steve Reeves, I don't think we get Arnold Schwarzenegger, and I think that's a pretty huge cultural impact.  

But back to the comparisons.  The biggest strength of The Slave is the direction.  The Tartars was dull, slowly paced and sluggish, and filmed in a style that was, well, old-fashioned.  They just plopped the camera down and let the actors run around in front of it (which isn't always a problem, necessarily, when you have good writing and good performances in front of that camera, neither of which The Tartars enjoys).   Say what you want about how cheesy these peplum films are.  A lot of them were directed by young and hungry filmmakers who were bringing creativity and energy to the proceedings.  The Slave, directed by Sergio Corbucci, features a snappier pace, quicker editing, and dynamic camera movement and angles that really make the film feel more modern.  Eventually, Corbucci and his other peplum filmmakers, including the legendary Sergio Leone, would bring what they learned to a new subgenre that would truly explode - the spaghetti Western.  The peplum films, whose popularity waned by the mid-1960s, proved to be their training grounds.  And it is a lot of fun to see this amount of creativity and energy being given to a film that many people wouldn't feel deserves it.  

I don't want to overstate my point, though.  I'm not saying The Slave is great cinema.  It's really not.  The story is goofy, the acting is very hit or miss, and there is a lot of silliness.  The history would be enough to drive classical historians bonkers.  But at the end of the day, there is a creativity to it that I really admired. Would I recommend it?  Maybe, depending on who I was talking to.  But did I personally enjoy it?  Yep.  And will I be willing to give other peplum films a chance?  I bet I will.  

MVP: 

This is surprisingly a difficult decision.  I really loved Randus' right hand man, Lumonius, played by Roland Bartrop.  He is irreverent and sarcastic, but his humor is really just a tool that hides an observant and cunning Roman officer.  He's probably the most intelligent character in the film, and Bartrop really digs his teeth into the character.  But at the end of the day, I have to give the MVP to Sergio Corbucci.  The main reason this movie works, aside from Steve Reeves' biceps, is because of Corbucci and the energy he brings.  It's my first Corbucci film, but this one makes me want to seek out The Last Days of Pompeii, The Great Silence, and his most enduring hit, the western Django.  

BEST LINE:

This time around, the best line really has to be the worst line.  This bit of dialogue, spoken by Randus to the beautiful slave girl Saïde is just wrong on so many levels that it made me laugh.  Does that make me a bad person?  Saïde is talking about how horrors of servitude and how her family was killed when the Roman armies attacked.  And this is Randus' reply: 

Randus: Look, I'm only a soldier.  I can't change the way things are.  There are masters and slaves.  Like there are pretty girls and ugly girls.  

WTF?!  And I think this is all happening when he's attempting to flirt with her?  Anyways, it's such a horrible line that it needed special attention.  

TRIVIA: 

I have no doubt that the producers considered The Slave to be their unofficial sequel to Kubrick's Spartacus.   For one thing, the movie mentions Spartacus' wife, Varinia.  She is a fictional character, invented specifically for the Howard Fast novel that the classic film is based on, and memorably played by Jean Simmons in the film.