Amazing trick Kubrick did in Spartacus. SPOILER ALERT

All through the film, in crowd shots of Spartacus's slave army, we repeatedly see several characters. A couple of young women, a family with a baby, children, etc. These people have no lines. We just come to recognize them from seeing them in the crowds and watching them performing simple day-to-day tasks among the bustle of the slave army camp. They cook, they play, they work, they care for the children, they bury a dead infant, they march, they stand in the battle lines... We get to know them a little, and recognize them as characters without a single line of dialogue.

Then after the final battle, we see their bodies lying open-eyed and dead among the heaps of the slain.

Another filmmaker would have made them full characters and had subplots devoted to them, stretching out the movie by another hour or so. Kubrick's ingenious and economical treatment makes us feel just as much sadness for their deaths simply from repeated sightings of them in the crowd.

I am amazed at how much emotion this movie can produce. Even moreso when you see how Kubrick all but abandoned emotionality in his later films.