Spartacus (film) eclipse him. Gracchus, having seen Rome fall into tyranny, commits suicide. Before doing so, he bribes his friend Batiatus to rescue Spartacus's family from Crassus and carry them away to freedom. On the way out of Rome, the group passes under Spartacus's cross. Varinia is able to comfort him in his dying moments by showing him his little son, who will grow up free and knowing who his father was. The development of "Spartacus" was partly instigated by Kirk Douglas's failure to win the title role in William Wyler's "Ben-Hur". Douglas had worked with Wyler before on "Detective Story", and
Title role not be fictional, such as Erin Brockovich in the film of the same name or Thomas More in the play "A Man for All Seasons" by Robert Bolt. The title character need not be named in the title, but may be referred to by some other word or phrase, such as Bilbo Baggins in "The Hobbit" or Idi Amin in "The Last King of Scotland". A title character may only be indirectly "described" in the title, as in "An Ideal Husband" by Oscar Wilde, where the 'ideal husband' (the title role) is the apparently perfect Sir Robert Chiltern. The title