Spartacus (1960)

Directed by Stanley Kubrick from a screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, this epic film is loosely based on the novel Spartacus (1951) by Howard Fast but also draws elements from Arthur Koestler's first novel, The Gladiators (1939), whose author had become a bitter enemy of Soviet communism. Koestler's novel was being developed into a Spartacus film at the same time (starring Yul Brynner as Spartacus and Anthony Quinn as Crassus), but the project was quashed because the Kubrick team was first to production despite an unfinished script in which the slave story and the main character were only roughly drawn. Later, as that story was being reworked and rewritten, Kubrick introduced a few provocative ideas from the Koestler novel into the Fast-based script. Starring Kirk Douglas (Spartacus), Jean Simmons (Varinia), Laurence Olivier (Crassus), Tony Curtis (Antoninus), Charles Laughton (Gracchus), Peter Ustinov (Batiatus, Oscar for Best supporting actor), and John Gavin (Julius Caesar), the movie is about the historical personage who led the Third Servile War, as that person has been interpreted over the centuries.
 
The film promotes the ideals of freedom and human dignity. Dalton Trumbo, who had been blacklisted (banned from working in Hollywood) along with nine other writers who refused to cooperate with the anti-Communist witch-hunts of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee during the early 1950s, wrote the screenplay in secret. Trumbo sought, with limited success, to create a Spartacus who fights for a transcendent vision of human brotherhood and liberation and to glorify the slaves as noble workers escaping oppression to build a sort of tribal communism. When Trumbo's name appeared on screen in the credits, despite a threatened boycott of the film by the American Legion, the blacklist was broken.