107: Mona Lisa

Mona Lisa, 1986, directed by Neil Jordan, screenplay by Neil Jordan and David Leland.

As anyone who has ever been a teenager will tell you, romantic obsession is more about subject than object. Proust grasped this completely:

No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves.

When you name your film after the blankest canvas in Western art, it's clear you're going to be exploring some of the same territory. Whatever Lisa del Giocondo may have been like in person, she is now and forever the sum of all the supplementary persons other people have projected onto her. Opening with Nat King Cole's song ("Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, men have named you...") is the icing on the cake. But out of all of the six million people who see the painting each year, geniuses and not-so-geniuses, only Neil Jordan looked at that mysterious smile and imagined Bob Hoskins smashing a pimp's face to a bloody pulp through a car window.

Mona Lisa is the strangest of films: a study of "the vast gulf of misunderstanding between men and women," wrapped in a fairy tale, wrapped in a Pygmalion story, wrapped in a British gangster movie. Oh, and tied up with a bow stolen from Taxi Driver:

Nothing about that combination should work, but it does, and wonderfully. It's the actors that put it over, mostly because they're so perfectly cast. The main character is the kind of part Bob Hoskins tears to shreds: a Little Englander named George who has just been released from prison. Hoskins can tell you so much about his character through the smallest gestures: look how much exposition he spares us with the expression on his face upon seeing blacks in his old neighborhood:

His ex-wife won't see him, his daughter doesn't know him, the criminals he did time for have abandoned him, and his neighborhood has collapsed. The one person who's glad to see him is his friend Thomas, played by Robbie Coltrane.

And here's where things start to go off into fairy tale land. Coltrane looks like a Hobbit to begin with, but Jordan has him live in the closest thing British gangster films have to an enchanted cave: a broken-down RV marooned inside of a garage.

If the look of the garage (or Coltrane, for that matter) didn't tip you off that this is a strange, magical kind of a place, perhaps the artificial plates of spaghetti are a clue:

It all seems a little on the nose laid out like that, but the great thing about Mona Lisa is that it's hard to think of it as anything but a straightforward British gangster film while watching it. How much British gangster credibility does it have? This much:

I love The Long Good Friday, but Michael Caine's Mortwell trumps Eddie Constantine any day of the week. Although George has been out of the picture too long to be of much use to his old crew, Mortwell throws him a bone: a job driving a high-end call girl named Simone from one assignation to another. Cathy Tyson plays Simone as the perfect embodiment of unattainable glamour and mystery.

Cathy's inner life is completely unimaginable to George, and he can't help but fill in the blanks. As in The Crying Game, the gulf between George and Simone has as much to do with class as gender: Simone may be "a tall, thin, black tart," as George puts it, but she moves in circles where George never fit in. He doesn't even know how much he doesn't know. On ordering tea from a hotel lobby bar, the waiter asks him, "Earl Grey or lapsang souchong?" "No, tea," George growls, unsure whether he's being made fun of. When Simone gives him money to buy better clothes, he shows up looking like this:

This leads to some of the film's funniest scenes, as Simone remakes George in a sort of reverse-Pretty-Woman sequence.

And that's where the troubles begin. People always forget that Henry Higgins took Eliza Dolittle under his wing to win a bet; Pygmalion sold a whole lot of statues before he fell for one of them. But really, how could George do anything but fall in love with the woman who makes him feel like he's as good as anyone else?

Simone isn't as innocent as a 16th-century sheet of poplar, of course. She's complicit in George's fantasies about her, because she wants more from George than the minimal social graces she'd require from a driver. She's desperately trying to find a prostitute named Cathy she knew when she was working a considerably more downscale beat, before life on the streets kills her. Night after night she has George drive her around neighborhoods as hallucinogenic as anything in Taxi Driver.

When Scorsese lights the streets that dramatically, it's because we're seeing them through the eyes of a man who imagines his alienation to be romantic, but whatever pale fire lights this shot in Mona Lisa is stolen from Simone. This becomes abundantly clear when George goes looking on his own, through a series of steadily more depressing clip joints. The sequence is horrifying enough that producer Denis O'Brien only allowed it in the film on the condition that it was a montage (set to "In Too Deep," by Phil Collins, which I'm sure the clubs' patrons would agree is an epic meditation on intangibility). The lighting is never flattering.

Things reach their inevitable nadir when George, believing he's finally found Cathy, is ushered into a sad little bedroom where a fifteen-year-old girl (Sammi Davis) sets aside her teddy bear and insists that she "make him happy."

She reminded me of Nabokov's sallow girl with her bald doll, a travesty of familial feeling. She's not really Cathy, it's not really her bedroom, and George can't save her. He does eventually find the woman Simone is looking for, in a church, of all places. And then things start getting really nasty.

Nearly every scene is filled with the detritus of fairy tales gone sour: pink frills, ice cream, "Michael Finnegan." George steals Cathy away from her rapist by vanishing her through a one-way mirror that opens like a door. When Simone tells George the story of her escape from low-end prostitution, it feels like the details she elides could involve wicked stepmothers, princes in disguise: "I met a man with a gold ring who took me to Brighton. When I woke up, he was gone." The whole thing sounds absurd on the page, and yet it feels so grounded in a particular time and place I never questioned the reality of the characters and their situation. Neil Jordan slips up only once, in my estimation, by staging Cathy and Simone's reunion at a roadside restaurant that makes the fairy tale aspects of the story too explicit. You might say he clobbers the audience over the head with a gigantic shoe.

It's the only misstep in a film that otherwise blends fairy tale archetypes and the seedy particulars of London crime with absolute virtuosity. I can't imagine any other director mixing the ridiculous and sublime as boldly as Jordan does when he has Bob Hoskins, at his moment of greatest fury and hostility, wear novelty sunglasses.

A little context is necessary: Hoskins is playing at being on vacation at the beach. It's thematically linked with all the other points in the film where characters do a bad job of pretending to have a good time. So it's brave, but it isn't entirely crazy. But have that same scene collapse in on itself and show us Simone and George at their rawest and most vulnerable, while still wearing those goddamned glasses: that's brilliant.

"You ever need someone?" Simone asks, and what she means, in this film about misunderstandings, is "Do you understand me?" George swallows, and looks at her, and the pause before he answers and the way Hoskins makes his voice crack when he finally speaks broke my heart. George says what he says, and you can tell it's as honest as this sad, lonely man has ever been with himself, and then he walks a little distance away to lean against the boardwalk's awning. He can't stand to be close to her at that moment, but he's near enough that she could follow. We know he hopes she does. "You ever need someone?" she asks him. "All the time."

Randoms

• Simone's vicious ex-pimp is played by none other than Clarke Peters, who went on to play Lester Freamon on The Wire. He's considerably less avuncular here.

Peters is also quite an athlete; he makes a flying leap over the corner of a pool table that I'm sure would end with a broken nose were I to attempt it.

• Mona Lisa was produced by HandMade Films, a collaboration between Denis O'Brien and George Harrison (they also made Monty Python's Life of Brian). I already mentioned that O'Brien was responsible for the Phil Collins montage, but Harrison contributed as well. According to Neil Jordan, his one stipulation was, "I just don't want to see any naked dicks in this movie." There are no naked dicks in Mona Lisa.
  
  
• This is the first non-anamorphic widescreen DVD in the collection in a long time; it's overdue for a new transfer. Although if any movie is going to benefit from looking grainy, it's a gangster movie set in and around strip clubs.
  
  
• Bob Hoskins tells an amazing story about Michael Caine on the commentary track that's too great not to reproduce in its entirety:

  I met Michael in Mexico. I was doing a film in Mexico with him. [Presumably Beyond the Limit] The first time I ever met Michael, he got ahold of me, he said, "''Ere. C'mere. I wanna talk to you." He says, "You've got a lot of talent and you're gonna earn a lot of money. And there's fings you do with your money and there's fings you don't do with your money, and the first fing you don't do with your money is buy a fucking boat, right?" Every time I see him: "I ain't bought a boat, Michael, I promise you." "Buy a house. That's better."

#106: Coup de Torchon

Coup de Torchon, 1981, directed by Bertrand Tavernier, screenplay by Bertrand Tavernier and Jean Aurenche, from the novel Pop. 1280 by Jim Thompson.

One of my favorite types of novel doesn't really have a name, but if it did, it would be something like "books with possibly unreliable narrators who are morally reprehensible but can also be quite charming, because, after all, they're the narrator." At the top of the list are Lolita and Money, of course, but below that things get muddier. It's not enough for the narrator to be morally compromised. It's not even completely necessary: The Catcher in the Rye and Pale Fire both fit the bill, despite the fact that neither Holden nor Kinbote are particularly evil. And despite their horrific narrators, neither American Psycho nor To The White Sea qualify. The difference is that Humbert Humbert, John Self, Holden Caulfield, and John Kinbote care what the reader thinks of them; Patrick Bateman and Muldrow do not. Above all, novels of this sort are cases for the defense.¹

And as it happens, cases for the defense are exceptionally difficult to adapt for film. With a very few exceptions, film has an implied third-person narrator that isn't known for lying or being charming, so it's hard to capture the tension between style and content that is at the heart of these works. The most successful adaptation of this type is Goodfellas, and it's worth noting how much formal trickery Scorsese needs to get there: freeze-frames, voiceover, self-consciously dazzling tracking shots, characters directly addressing—or shooting—the camera... it's dizzying. Unless you're Martin Scorsese (even if you're Kubrick), you'd probably do better to leave this kind of story alone.

Unless, of course, your goal is to make a film that's quite different from its source material. Fortunately, that seems to have been Bernard Tavernier was up to when he set out to adapt Jim Thompson's Pop. 1280, a black valentine of a pulp novel that fits comfortably into the tradition of cases for the defense. The first sentence of the novel is "Well, sir, I should have been sitting pretty, just about as pretty as a man could sit," and the rest follows suit: conversational, friendly, and addressed to that "sir." Thompson's narrator is Nick Corey, a do-nothing sheriff of a do-nothing southern county. He doesn't have the eloquence of Humbert Humbert or the mad energy of John Self, but he's charming and funny and wants the reader to like him. And we do like him, which makes it increasingly uncomfortable as we realize just how far off the rails he's gone. Although there are plenty of scenes in the novel that would work well on film, most of the work depends on the tone, in passages where nothing is happening except for whatever's happening in Corey's head.

So Pop. 1280, on its face, doesn't seem well suited for film to begin with. It's an especially bad idea for a French director to attempt it; the American South is difficult enough for Americans to get right on film, never mind non English-speakers. Bernard Tavernier explains in one of the DVD extras that he'd tried for years to figure out a way to film Pop. 1280 without success. Eventually, he found an elegant solution to the novel's setting: rather than trying to capture the details of a culture he didn't know, or move the story to France and make key plot points implausible, he set it in French West Africa, in July of 1938. That gave him two things the story needed: a despised racial underclass and plenty of open space. But it's still a novel whose formal qualities are ill-suited to film. Nick Corey can describe the most appalling things in ways that minimize his own involvement, even make them funny; Lucien Cordier (Nick's name in the film) can not. Tavernier's solution to this is surprising and impressive: he simply embraces the fact that Cordier's actions will seem bewildering and horrifying and runs with it. The result is a film quite different in tone, where black humor has been replaced with existential dread.

That doesn't mean that Tavernier's main character, whose name has been changed to Lucien Cordier, is completely devoid of Nick Corey's lackadaisical charm. Tavernier cast Philippe Noiret, who trades on the same kind features that would later serve him so well in Cinema Paradiso and The Postman. With a little help from the costume department (that hat! that shirt!), Noiret presents himself as a kind of holy fool. Here, he's just realized that the hat he is looking for has been on his head all along.

The costumes actually do a surprising amount of the heavy lifting, placing the early scenes in the world of comedy. Here are Stéphane Audran and Eddy Mitchel as Lucien's wife and her mentally challenged lover, in what must certainly be the most cartoonish flagrante delicto ever.

The curlers are nice, but it's the tufted slippers that push Audran's outfit completely over the edge. Isabelle Huppert is equally good as Lucien's mistress, Rose (one of the few characters who keeps her name from the novel).

Casting Isabelle Huppert is always a good idea, but it works especially well here: Rose's avarice, lust, and rage, filtered through Huppert's childlike frame, produces something like a female version of Hop-Frog. So some of the humor is still there; but Tavernier lets it go sour much faster than Thompson does. Consider one of the changes Tavernier and Aurenche make to the novel's chronology. One of the ways Nick Corey gets his revenge is more of a prank than a crime. Corey is bothered by the smell of an outhouse near his home. Unable to get the city to move it, he resorts to cutting halfway through some of the boards so that one of the town's dignitaries falls in the shit (and immediately demands the outhouse be removed and filled in, solving Nick's problem). The scene's still in the film:

And it's as slapsticky as it is in the novel. But while Thompson has this happen in the first twenty pages, Tavernier puts it after we've seen Cordier murder three people. We're expecting Lucien to pull out his revolver and start gunning people down at any minute, which makes the whole thing a lot less hilarious. It's too late for slapstick to ingratiate Lucien with us.

Making that scene really uncomfortable for viewers is part of a larger aesthetic choice not to minimize or excuse Cordier's murders, the way Thompson's narrator does (at least early in the novel). Here's how Nick Corey tells the reader about murdering two local pimps in cold blood, using the sound of a steamboat whistle to cover the gunshots:

"Good night, ye merry gentlemen," I said. "Hail and farewell."

The Ruby Clark whistled.

By the time the echo died, Moose and Curly were in the river, each with a bullet spang between his eyes.

I waited on the little pier for a minute until the Ruby had gone by. I always say there's nothing prettier than a steamboat at night.

Spang! On film, there's only so much you can do with this. You could try to render Nick's lacuna by cutting to the steamboat whistle, then back to the pimps dead in the river, but since the audience isn't thinking of the camera as a first-person narrator, we wouldn't credit that gap to Nick. And it's an inescapable fact that although a description of a body with a bullet "spang between the eyes" is funny, an image would not be. Tavernier just goes ahead and shows the pimps getting shot:

It's still kind of funny: those ridiculous suits, the jacket on fire, but it doesn't have the same tone. In Thompson's version of the story, the build-up to nihilism is gradual; it's the second to last chapter before Nick Corey goes big and gives us his vision of a sick, dying universe, of "all the sad and terrible things that the emptiness had brought the people to." Tavernier goes full apocalypse in the very first scene: a complete solar eclipse.

"I thought it was Judgment Day,"² says one of the characters. Well, there's no eclipse in Pop. 1280, nor was there one in July of 1938, so someone's behind it. The line is repeated during another scene found in the film but not the novel, a sandstorm during an outdoor film screening.

Even suggesting the possibility of judgment puts Coup de Torchon in a different moral universe than Pop. 1280, and once you realize that, his other decisions fall into place. Thompson's characters are monstrous from beginning to end, but Tavernier's characters are monstrous in a way that depends on them being in French West Africa, a place where, as Lucien puts it, good and evil get rusty. You can see this pretty clearly the way he treats Anne (Irène Skobline), a schoolteacher who has just arrived in town. When she first appears, she seems like a civilizing influence on Lucien, but she gradually becomes more complicit in his crimes. There's a lovely scene where she tells her illiterate students that a confession Lucien has scrawled on the blackboard is actually "La Marseillaise."

Her analogue in the novel is as petty as Rose, from start to finish; there's no decline. So why do Tavernier and Aurenche go out of their way to build in a fall from grace? People criticize Coup de Torchon for its nihilism, and it's true that most of the characters are nihilists; but not Lucien. As he tells Rose, his mission is to "just help people to reveal their real nature." It just so happens that he's in a time and place where a whole lot of people are just about to reveal their true natures. The film is set during the summer and early fall of 1938; one of the last scenes is a celebration of the signing of the Munich Accords. Which is to say it's set during the last few months Europeans could pretend they were going to resolve their disagreements without murdering each other. Which is to say it's set during the last few months the French could plausibly be said to have an empire. Which is to say the film's characters have a dim sense of approaching doom that the novel's characters do not. The Netflix sleeve for this one reads, "Out of the blue, the ostensibly brainless Lucien decides to seek vengeance..." But it's not out of the blue, in French West Africa, in 1938. They'll think it's judgment day.

Randoms:

• The look of the film is perfect throughout. It's sort of an anti-Out of Africa; Tavernier's Africa has no sweeping vistas or exotic wildlife; it's as faded as Lucien's shirt.

He also gets a lot of mileage out of using a Steadicam in scenes where other people might use a tracking shot; the camera swoops around its subjects in a way that suggests neither classical Hollywood film making nor any attempt at documentary style. It suits the film perfectly.


• Apparently American audiences didn't want to see a non-exoticised Africa, however: the American poster features a silhouette of spear-carrying tribesmen, and utterly fails to convey that this is a noir.

Needless to say, there are no tribesmen in the film.


• Sometimes, producers are right. Tavernier's original vision for the film's ending went much bigger on the whole end-of-civilization theme, in a way that he now admits was probably not his best idea. He wanted to have the dancers at the celebration gradually replaced by dancers in military uniforms, then replaced by skeletons, then have apes dancing, to make some kind of point about the cyclic nature of history. Only he couldn't afford the uniforms or the skeletons, so he just shot it with the ape suits.

I like to imagine the look on the producers' faces when they saw those dailies.

¹The question of why I enjoy novels in which rat bastard narrators make pleas for clemency is left as an exercise for the reader.

²I think the literal translation of the line is "I thought it was the end of the world," which is rendered "I thought it was judgment day" in the subtitle. Same idea, though.

#105: Spartacus

Spartacus, 1960, directed by Stanley Kubrick, screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, from the novel by Howard Fast

When most actors discover they didn't get a role they wanted, they react like you or I would: by driving to Las Vegas and spending the rent money on blackjack and cocaine. But Kirk Douglas was never most actors. So when William Wyler gave the role of Ben Hur to Charlton Heston, Douglas decided he'd make his own sand and sandals epic, better than Ben Hur, staring himself and not Charlton Heston, and who wants to work with William Wyler anyway? For his subject, Douglas chose Howard Fast's fictionalized version of the Third Servile War, Spartacus. Perhaps Douglas recognized a kindred spirit in Fast, who, on finding himself blacklisted from publishing because of his refusal to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, published Spartacus himself. Like most projects started to compensate for rejection, Spartacus is self-consciously designed to proclaim its own greatness in every possible way. But it was made during the golden age of Hollywood epics, when the bar for films proclaiming their own greatness was very high indeed; Cleopatra wouldn't spoil everyone's fun for another three years. So how did Douglas signify to audiences that they were watching an epic?

Start with the film stock. Part of the point of epic filmmaking is to make something that television can't possibly compete with, which means an very wide aspect ratio, projected on gigantic screens. Masked 35mm is the cheapest and easiest way to get the aspect ratio, but you're not even using the entire 35mm frame, so it gets grainy if you project it on too big a screen. Anamorphic 35mm uses the full frame and looks better—that's what widescreen filmmakers normally use today—but it's still not as sharp as you want if you're going to project it onto screens the size of small towns. So you've gotta go higher resolution, which usually means 65mm stock. Ben Hur—the production Douglas saw as his direct competition—was shot using a process called MGM Camera 65, which not only used a 65mm negative but an anamorphic lens on top of that, and produced what is probably the widest aspect ratio in commercial features: a 2.76:1 image. But 65mm film stock is ridiculously expensive, so Spartacus was shot using a different process called Super Technirama 70. Despite the name, Super Technirama doesn't require 65mm film stock. Instead, standard 35mm was run through the camera sideways, allowing for a wider aspect ratio that could still produce a good-looking 70mm print.¹ Which is to say, a print where shots like this look like an army, not a failed experiment in Pointillism.

That kind of shot is what large-format film is designed for—you can see every dollar on-screen. And Spartacus lets you know with every frame that giant screens are the only way to see it; this was not shot with television in mind. Take the scene where Tony Curtis's Antoninus performs a magic trick for a group of rebel slaves. Kubrick opens with this shot:

A contemporary filmmaker shooting the same scene might use that framing as an establishing shot, but Kubrick stays on it for more than thirty seconds, following Curtis as he performs an entire magic trick. He only cuts closer when Curtis approaches Jean Simmons and Kirk Douglas, and even then the camera keeps its distance. It's true that long takes are still around, but look how little of the frame Curtis takes up, and keep in mind that the point of the shot is what Curtis is doing with his hands. There are ways to signify "epic" without using giant crowds.

I found it interesting to compare Kubrick's compositions with contemporary use of wide aspect ratios, more for what's missing than what's there. You won't find a shot in Spartacus that resembles this:

Or this, from a very different filmmaker the same year:

With a very few exceptions, Kubrick's close-ups show the actor's full head, as in this shot:

And, although there are plenty of wide-angle shots, you won't find anything like this:

Or this:

There are wide-angle medium shots, like this one:

But notice that John Dall is far enough back from the camera that his face isn't particularly distorted; compare that to Bill Murray's cartoonish face in the still from Rushmore (or pretty much any close-up in A Clockwork Orange). It's a different cinematic grammar, closer to classical Hollywood cinema than anything else of Kubrick's I've seen.

The camera movement is also atypical for Kubrick̬his previous film was Paths of Glory, in which the most striking visual images depend on tracking backward through the trenches—and of course, this is the man who would go on to photograph the corridors of the Overlook Hotel. But in Spartacus, the camera is pretty stationary throughout; most of the motion is panning, and limited examples of horizontal tracking. There most prominent exceptions bring us back to the "self-consciously epic" thing. There's a long shot of horsemen in a distant valley:

Which tracks back to reveal a watchman on the cliff above:

And then tracks further back to pick up Kirk Douglas on horseback:

From there the camera tracks horizontally as Spartacus rides through the camp. So Kubrick uses a track backwards to play with scale in a way that makes viewers painfully aware of what a gigantic production they're seeing. Then there's this sequence, after the climactic battle between the rebel slaves and the Romans:

The camera tracks forward over the bodies of the defeated slaves, slowly panning up to reveal that the carnage goes as far as the eye can see. As with the other sequence, the tracking is used to for an effect of scale: you wouldn't believe how many corpses the Romans produced! And if this shot reminds audiences of another epic, then so much the better. So there are some examples of three-dimensional movement in the film, but I thought it was striking how stationary the camera remained, and how self-consciously horizontal many of the compositions are. It doesn't get any more wide-screen than this:

In short, it doesn't look anything like a Stanley Kubrick film. But this was an atypical production for Kubrick, the only one he didn't have near-complete control. He was brought in a week into shooting when Douglas fired Anthony Mann, handed a copy of the script and given a weekend to take over the production (his offer to rewrite the script was summarily rejected). Spartacus was a smart career move for him, since he hadn't made a film in two years and had never run a production of this size, but it's clear his heart wasn't really in it.²

Which makes it sound like Spartacus was doomed to mediocrity by its troubled production history, but it does has its pleasures. Mostly, they come from the last ingredient for an epic: epic casting. There's no question that Douglas is the star (and plenty of shots of him looking noble):

But you can't make a really big movie with only one star; convention demands that such a film be cast within an inch of its life. So for every scene where Kirk Douglas speechifies about freedom and slavery, there's a matching scene where Lawrence Olivier, as Crassus, is sinister and sly.

Better yet are Peter Ustinov and Charles Laughton, who often seem to be checking in from a different film, a light comedy about lust and gluttony.

As it happens, that isn't far from the truth: Ustinov apparently rewrote most of their scenes, much to Dalton Trumbo's dismay. So although it may not serve the rest of the film well, the scenes with Ustinov are better than the ones with Douglas. Ustinov won an Oscar for his performance; Douglas wasn't even nominated.

That isn't entirely fair to Douglas: it's always more interesting to watch vice than virtue. But the difference between the Roman scenes and the scenes with Spartacus is so great that I think it points to the film's biggest problem: Spartacus doesn't have any flaws. After the film's opening scenes, in which Spartacus is basically feral, he stops making mistakes. There aren't any arguments among the slaves about what to do, there aren't any power struggles between Spartacus and his lieutenants, there aren't any tactical errors. There are flickers of life when Herbert Lom appears as an untrustworthy pirate:

But for the most part the scenes with the slave army are a cinematic essay about how great freedom is in general, and how great Spartacus is in particular. Any actor would have a hard time making that kind of pablum interesting, but Kirk Douglas is particularly ill suited for it. I've always thought he was better cast as a villain than as a hero; he has a hail-fellow-well-met quality that only shines for me when it's backed by malice. But malice is beneath Spartacus, and that's the problem. In his effort to outdo Ben Hur, Douglas ended up playing a character who was too heroic to be interesting. Still, he's undeniably epic.

Randoms:

• The commentary track on the DVD is fascinating, most of all for novelist Howard Fast's contributions, which run the gamut from passive-aggressive to positively venomous. Fast was originally hired to write the screenplay, then fired when it became apparent that his version of the film would contain more speeches than action. You can predict what he'll think of any given scene by checking how closely it follows his novel. Two examples:

  This, for example, is not in the book. I don't know that it adds very much. If I remember, the dialogue is rather silly.
  
  . . . .
  
  This is a brilliantly done scene; it is lifted out of the book almost in its entirety, and well directed, and well done.

  I highly recommend listening to the whole thing.
  
  
• Spartacus gets a lot of credit for the political act of hiring Dalton Trumbo and crediting him under his real name, helping to break the blacklist. And it definitely deserves that praise. But it's also worth noting that the battle scenes were filmed in Franco's Spain, where the production paid the government directly for the uses of the Army. So Spartacus is one of those symbolically-upholding-freedom-while-paying-cash-money-to-dictators productions. Like U.S. foreign policy!

Update: Robert Taylor has thoughts in a similar vein about the film here.

¹The difference between 65mm stock and 70mm prints is the 5mm section used for the film's soundtrack.

²As Kubrick put it years later, "I don't know what to say to people who tell me 'Boy, I really loved Spartacus.'"