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For all its bows to the bankers, Spartacus is a peculiarly impressive piece of moviemaking. Director Stanley Kubrick, 32, shows mastery in all departments: cast, camera and cutting. In intimate scenes his camera follows the action with delicacy and precision; but he also knows when to let the frame stand grandly still and the audience stare, as if through a huge picture window, at a magnificent landscape or a ponderous ballet of legions that precedes a battle.
As might be expected, Olivier makes a memorable Crassus, emerging as a voluptuary of power, a moral idiot whose only feelings are in his skin; and Laughton picks the ham bone clean as the jolly demagogue Gracchus, a figure as hilarious and frightening as Khrushchev in a bed sheet. Even wooden-faced Hero Douglas is inspired by Kubrick's direction, and perhaps by his own authority as producer of the picture, to achieve a certain consistency of obviousness that, without actual characterization, nevertheless suggests a character.
Much as it owes to Kubrick, Spartacus owes even more to its script, which Scenarist Trumbo has adorned with humor, eloquence, sophistication and a corrosive irony. Above all, despite his personal predilection for the 20th century's most crushing political orthodoxy, Trumbo has imparted to Spartacus a passion for freedom and the men who live and die for it —a passion that transcends all politics and persons in the fearful, final image of the dying gladiator, the revolutionary on the cross.
Midnight Lace (Universal-International) is another of those recurrent thrillers (Sorry, Wrong Number, Gaslight, The Two Mrs. Carrolls, Julie) in which a dear, sweet, innocent girl is pursued by a shadowy figure of evil who threatens her with all sorts of insidious molestation and who generally turns out to be "No! No! Not YOU!" Like its predecessors. Midnight Lace is not very interesting in itself, but it is uncomfortably fascinating when considered as one of the persistent fantasies of a monogamous society.
In this instance the woman is an American heiress (Doris Day) who has just married a British industrialist (Rex Harrison). One day, in that London fog the thriller business can't seem to find its way out of, the heroine is addressed by a queer, high, male voice that sputters obscenities at her and then threatens to murder her within a month. Soon after that she has a brush with a falling girder. Then a tall, dark stranger looms at her bedroom window. Then somebody pushes her in front of a bus. And so on till the tension has her ready for the funny farm. False leads trail off in at least seven directions, but the climax of the film will come to most mystery buffs as no surprise.
Credits: the screen play, by Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts, is competent. The Eastman Color is pleasant. Rex Harrison is smooth and plausible. Doris Day wears a lot of expensive clothes, and in attempting to portray the all-American missus behaves like such a silly, spoiled, hysterical, middle-aged Lolita that many customers may find themselves less in sympathy with her plight than with the villain's murderous intentions.