Have you ever wanted to see Malcolm McDowell’s cock? Caligula: The Ultimate Cut is at least one place to find it, the movie released in 1979 marking the high water mark of the arthouse/porn crossover.
The story behind the making of the film threatens to overshadow the plot of the film itself, which can be distilled as “man becomes emperor of Rome, goes mad, pays the price”, and as I’ve written about it at length once already, here’s the link if you don’t know how it goes.
Briefly, the film, financed by soft-porn outfit Penthouse, was shot by Tinto Brass but was then drastically altered in post-production, with producer and Penthouse owner Bob Guccione getting in a second director, Giancarlo Lui, to shoot porn inserts. Almost everyone involved in the original film dissociated themselves from it, some going to law, others just retiring to lick their wounds.
Which is how the likes of Peter O’Toole, John Gielgud and Helen Mirren wound up in a movie for the “dirty mac brigade”, as the patrons of sleazy arthouse/wankhouse cinemas (in many British towns they were the same place) were often described.
The Ultimate Cut goes back to Brass’s 90-odd hours of camera negative and assembles an entirely new cut, restoring not so much Brass’s original film, minus porn inserts, but Gore Vidal’s original vision, as expressed through his screenplay.
The most surprising thing about this new cut is that it, too, is also absolutely heaving with sex, nudity, tits and cock. But then that is the story Vidal, Brass et al are telling – the Roman empire, in the shape of a mad emperor, brought down by sexual licence, absolute power corrupting absolutely.
Whatever else it is this film is gorgeous to look at, almost all of it done in the studio, where the massive and impressive sets are lit gauzily by Silvano Ippoliti to emphasise the lush and the lavish, whether it’s marble floors or a sinuous female form.
The film opens with a shot of Caligula in bed with his sister Drusilla (Teresa Ann Savoy, drafted in after Maria Schneider balked at the nudity), then moves on to the most decadent section of the entire film – Caligula’s visit to his grandfather, the Emperor Tiberius (Peter O’Toole looking scabby, sex-mad, crazed) – a man living among a 24/7 orgy held entirely in his honour. Then to Caligula’s takedown of the aged emperor, his marriage to the biggest sexual libertine in Rome (Helen Mirren), and on to a series of increasingly insane edicts, which lead the court to start intriguing against him.
There’s not a lot of plot but there is plenty of spectacle, and McDowell holds it together with a lithe, boggle-eyed, nostril-flared performance you can’t imagine anyone else delivering. He has the right look for a Roman emperor, of course – the ringlet-y hair, the square head – and he knows how to use it. Fans of McDowell’s buttocks get facefuls of those too.
Whether Caligula is actually mad or just has run right off the rails thanks to absolute power, or is bored to distraction and does some mad stuff just to piss off the senate – like invading “Britain” (a nearby lake) or making his horse a consul – is left half open. Throughout, Helen Mirren’s sensible, careful Caesonia acts as a weather vane, an eyebrow-raise here or a lip-purse there passing judgement as Caligula dares anyone to take him down. The end, when it comes for this very erratic emperor, can be seen coming.
The film, along with his earlier Salon Kitty, marked the transition of Tinto Brass from arthouse darling to creator of smut and it sits right in the overlapping circles of that Venn diagram. It also came out the same year as Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, and it’s very tempting to watch it as a comedy. Look carefully and you can probably spot Biggus Dickus.
Except there aren’t any jokes. A bit more light and shade might have made for a better film, but you cannot deny the full-bore intensity of it, and its insane, crazy, massively over-indulgent redundancy. Art imitates life.
Tinto Brass, meanwhile, unhappy in 1979 at what Guccione’s hired man did to his film, is unhappy again at this 2023 re-assemblage, put together as a labour of love by Thomas Negovan and with an excellent and entirely new score (voiceless choirs, synth drones, a touch of Vangelis at his most paranoid) by Troy Sterling Nies, who has probably bounced himself up several pay grades with his work here.
Brass has a point – this is not the film he made. But it is vastly better than the 1979 Guccione-altered one and it was shot by Brass so represents at least the extravagant look and feel of his original idea – the Roman Empire and its succession of rulers as a sex-soaked, entirely decadent and brutally inglorious bun fight.
Caligula: The Ultimate Cut – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
