The Myth Of Caligula

The mythology of Caligula has become one of the great movie stories – a tale of wild excess, clashing egos and an ambitious project ruined by a barbarian pornographer. The writer and director had their names removed from the film, the stars lined up to condemn it and the critics savaged it. Urban legends of unheard-of levels of depravity during the film’s production quickly became established as fact and far from ushering in a new world of sexually explicit big-budget cinema, Caligula became a name synonymous with self-indulgence, bad taste and cinematic awfulness.

The new release of Caligula: The Ultimate Cut – an interestingly-named project that used the 120 miles of film that director Tinto Brass shot and which had long been thought lost – sells itself on this mythology. Here, we are told, is a film that could have been a masterpiece but which was instead destroyed by its crass producer, the open-shirted, medallion-wearing Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione. Now, using this previously unseen material, the film has been reconstructed, removing Guccione’s extra hardcore scenes and inserts featuring Penthouse Pets like Anneka Di Lorenzo and Lori Wagner, reworking the film into the masterpiece that it was always intended to be.

The problem with all this is that the story of Caligula is not as straightforward as you might believe.

Caligula was shot in 1976, as Gore Vidal’s Caligula, based on a screenplay commissioned by co-producer Franco Rossellini (a man who never gets any of the blame for the film’s final outcome; interesting, that). Vidal, the author of Myra Breckinridge and a noted man of letters, was nothing if not self-assured. He believed that the authorship of a film lay with the writer rather than the director – an interesting idea given that screenplays are routinely and necessarily overhauled during both production and post-production, with the director and editor generally making the final decision about what stays in and what goes out. He named the project Gore Vidal’s Caligula in order to emphasise this belief and to impose a certain control over whoever the director might be.

Unfortunately for Vidal, film directors tend not to support the ‘screenwriter auteur’ theory. An early choice to helm this was Italian director Lina Wertmuller, then riding high with films like Swept Away and Seven Beauties. She was only interested if the film could be retitled Lina Wertmuller’s Caligula, which clearly wasn’t going to fly with Vidal. Guccione and Rossellini both wanted Tinto Brass, who seemed a fine choice – a deeply political filmmaker who had risen out of the arthouse world, Brass had just made Salon Kitty, a controversial and explicit film that also dealt with madness, obsession and sexual extremity. Clearly, Brass would not be phased by the sexual requirements of Caligula or its political subtexts.

Vidal, however, hated Salon Kitty with a vengeance and so the search for a director went on until the author was eventually told that Brass had been hired and he’d just have to live with it. The pair reached an uneasy understanding and worked on rewrites together as the budget exploded and Danilo Donati’s extravagant sets demanded an altogether more fantastical, absurdist narrative. Vidal’s screenplay had been grimly serious but Brass saw the film as a black comedy, even though he was keen to keep the film’s political subtext. The two would soon fall out though. Vidal did an interview in which he described film directors as effectively sheep who needed to be led by the screenplay, and this did not go down well with Brass, who banned the author from the set. The production, including star Malcolm McDowell, mostly sided with Brass (Peter O’Toole, an old friend of Vidal’s, hated Brass immediately and his dismissive comments about how awful the film was – before it had even been completed – set the scene for the critical response to come).

Vidal insisted that his name be taken off the film entirely. Guccione and Rossellini refused and a protracted legal argument – not actually involving Vidal suing, it must be noted – ended up in an uneasy compromise. His name would be removed from the contract but the film was credited as being “based on a screenplay by Gore Vidal”. No actual screenplay author was listed. This would not be the end of the film’s odd production credits.

After the arguments with Vidal, the production was rather smooth. For Giccione though, there was the suspicion that Brass was not sticking to the plan. He’d been taken on as a director for hire, and his contract stated that he had to follow Guccione’s instructions to the letter. But that was never going to happen with a creative like Brass. When Guccione visited the set, Brass dutifully filled the set with Penthouse Pets; when Guccione left, they were pushed to the background or not used at all. Brass knew that these very 1970s glamour models would be more of a distraction than a bonus, and time has proven him right – the Pets ground the film in mid-1970s erotica while everything else feels oddly timeless.

Once the film wrapped, Guccione took his revenge. He gathered up all the footage and took it to England, hiding it in cans labelled with fake movie titles, because UK customs were already very aware of this film. Had the negatives been seized, that would have been it for the project – $17.5 million down the drain. In Twickenham, the film was edited by Russell Lloyd while Brass worked on his own version next door. Guccione, meanwhile, snuck back onto the sets with filmmaker Giancarlo Lui to shoot several hours of hardcore scenes with the Pets and some supporting cast members. This was primarily a lesbian scene between Di Lorenzo and Wagner that always felt like a clumsy insertion and a series of close-ups in the film’s brothel scene, which work surprisingly well; you would not know that these were additions unless you’d been told. However, he also expanded the length of this scene considerably, meaning that McDowell’s dialogue is awkwardly repeated again and again.

Once all the footage was safely in England, Brass was fired and locked out of his editing suite. He sued to regain control but the case dragged on as Lloyd’s edit continued. By all accounts, this edit of the film is fairly faithful to what Brass had shot, even using the director’s own edited material. Inevitably, this version has vanished. Guccione then hired another editor, Nino Baragli, who – under the instruction of Giancarlo Lui – attempted to rework the film to match Gore Vidal’s original screenplay. This meant removing additional dialogue added by Brass, as well as other details not in the original screenplay. Yet the film that had been shot already diverted from Vidal’s version, in tone, as well as content. The resulting film was understandably disjointed. More edits ensued, along with new dialogue that often had to be added to scenes where you could only see the back of a character’s head. It all began to feel very compromised.

Brass refused to be credited as the director; therefore, Caligula has no director credit, a fairly unique moment in cinema. Instead, he is listed as ‘principle photographer’ with the closest to a director credits being ‘additional scenes directed by Bob Guccione and Giancarlo Lui’. Russell Lloyd declined to be credited as the editor, so there is no credit there either apart from ‘edited by The Production’, whatever that means.

Caligula was released in 1980 to critical fury, which might be partly explained by the fact that there were no press shows – critics had to line up to buy tickets just like everyone else and they hate doing that. There was an unconventional US release – Guccione hired a cinema in New York, renamed it The Penthouse East and played the film there exclusively, unrated. The ticket price was $7.50 at a time when the average movie ticket cost a third of that. The release pattern would then be repeated in cinemas that ran arthouse and foreign films, in order to avoid any connection with adult theatres.

In Britain, the UK customs tried to stop the print from entering the country – unaware of the fact that it had been edited here – and eventually only agreed if the print was shipped directly to the British Board of Film Censors, where BBFC head James Ferman, customs officers and Penthouse lawyers laboured over creating a version that would be legally acceptable. Some alternative footage made its way into this print – who knows how? – and the film eventually had a reasonably successful, rather more mainstream UK release. It would not be passed uncut for UK release until 2008.

It’s easy for smug critics to dismiss Guccione as a barbarian pornographer, a man of low taste and low intelligence, but that is a dreadful bit of arrogant sneering from the sort of people who see erotic entertainment as inherently worthless. Guccione was a great photographer and a man who wanted to raise the bar, not lower it. Penthouse was a fantastic magazine at its peak and we should remember that no one else was ever going to spend millions of dollars on a film like Caligula – a movie that, in whatever version it had been released in, was always going to push the envelope of acceptability.

The myth of Caligula – that Guccione destroyed the artistic vision of Vidal and Brass, betrayed his cast and ruined the film – has been told so often that it has become the accepted truth. But each version of the film would have featured the sort of explicit sexual imagery that even in 1976 would’ve frightened off any other producer. People forget that Guccione’s hardcore inserts represent a tiny part of a 156-minute movie and are – for the most part – seamlessly integrated. There are many explicit moments that Brass shot and many that exist in Vidal’s screenplay. This was always going to be a film that shocked audiences and alienated critics. Does that matter? Just look at how every year we see idiotic, narcissistic critics performatively booing challenging films at the Cannes Film Festival. The moral condemnation of Caligula puts it in the company of movies like Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, David Cronenberg’s Crash, Antichrist and Taxi Driver. Not bad, all in all.

What’s more, I’ll defend some of Guccione’s choices. While the lesbian scene between the two Penthouse Pets is a clumsy addition, the hardcore inserts in the film’s climactic orgy don’t feel especially out of place. There seems to be a wilful misunderstanding of how films are edited when people complain about the wide shots cutting to these close-ups and the idea that brief clips of explicit sex don’t belong in an orgy scene is laughably moralistic.

Caligula is a tale of excess and extremity, the story of a man who had the power to do anything he wanted and so did. It’s not a film that demands restraint. Certainly, the version that we have seen until now is an uneven production that reveals the chaotic post-production and conflicting interests. But in a way, that’s what makes it great. And oddly, despite everything that happened – or perhaps even because of it – Caligula is a great film, one that is unique in the history of cinema. In a world where movies are ground out by production factories and all look and feel the same, Caligula seems unlike anything else ever made. It’s a movie that never allows the viewer to feel comfortable as it jumps from one moment of delirium to the next and there is something rather admirable about that. Despite the claims of critics who protest too much (the sort who are quick to tell us that they never find erotic films rousing, just boring – though the sniggering reactions you would hear at press screenings told a different story) the film is never boring. It may be disjointed but there is always something extraordinary on screen, the like of which you have probably never seen before. It still shocks because it is hard to believe that anything this utterly unrestrained could have been made. Somehow, Caligula becomes more than the sum of its parts, perhaps because it is so conflicted and contradictory.

It also feels like the final gasp of unrestrained 1970s cinema, when boundaries were being pushed and taboos broken and where people genuinely believed that hardcore cinema would eventually cross over into mainstream Hollywood, with explicit scenes included in major movies. People think of that as laughably naive, but we forget how close we came – Brian De Palma wanted to make Body Double with hardcore scenes, European filmmakers like Bertolucci pushed the envelope and only the inherent conservatism of the American studio system and the dreadful ratings system created by the MPAA – where the X quickly came to be a taboo rather than simply an adults-only rating as it was elsewhere – kept it from becoming a reality.

Caligula feels like the closest we came to this convergence, a film with big-name, respectable actors who all knew exactly what they were involved in. It’s another part of the Caligula mythology that Malcolm McDowell, John Gielgud, Helen Mirren and the rest had no idea that the film would include explicit sex. Their objections – sometimes honest, sometimes disingenuous bits of face-saving – were to the Guccione inserts and the edit of the film, not to the explicit sex scenes that Brass shot and Vidal wrote. Both John Gielgud and Helen Mirren cheerfully referred to the film as ‘pornographic’ even as they were making it and no one involved was duped into making a sexually explicit movie when they thought that they were shooting a historical epic.

There’s even an argument to be made that Guccione was the one being screwed. In his surprisingly frank Penthouse interview about the film, he makes it clear that both Vidal and Brass went off-script – Vidal in delivering a screenplay that was full of gay sex, making it closer to Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane than anything and so not the film that the thoroughly heterosexual Guccione had hired him to write, while Brass would shove the Penthouse Pets into the background and instead fill the screen with what Guccione described as “fat, ugly and wrinkled old women” and cast “ex-convicts, thieves and political anarchists” as Roman senators. He also complained that Brass failed to use half of the hugely expensive sets that Donati had created.

The problem with Caligula and any claims of authenticity is that the project was the work of three very different people, each working to their own particular tastes, peccadillos and obsessions, and each of whom thought that they were in charge of the project. Vidal wrote a gay-heavy tale of the corruption of power; Brass shot a luridly comic, anarchic study of decadence and depravity; Guccione wanted an unrestrained spectacle of sex and violence with Penthouse pets. The film that we eventually ended up with was a delirious collision of all three visions, one that could have never satisfied anyone involved.

There may never be a definitive version of Caligula. It’s a film that existed in several versions even before the new Ultimate Edition. As well as Guccione’s cut, there was the British theatrical version and an alternative VHS version released by Electric Video. There was the incoherent 90-minute R-rated version, the longer pre-release version, the Imperial Edition from the 2007 DVD release that first attempted to reconstruct the film according to what Brass had planned and the Channel 4 TV version that Mark Kermode laughably presented as ‘the director’s cut’, even though it simply had all the sexually explicit content cut. Notably, none of these versions were approved by or even involved Tinto Brass, and the new Ultimate Cut – and my God, isn’t that a pompously arrogant title when you think about it? – is no different. In fact, Brass threatened legal action against the film in 2023 for crediting him as director. At the same time, he has shown no interest in re-editing the film over the years and is now 90, so the chances of us ever really seeing the version that this most unique of directors and editors intended are effectively non-existent.

All that said, let’s take a look at the Ultimate Cut.

The first thing that immediately made me raise my eyebrows when reading the press release for this new version of the film was the suggestion that it would be finally bringing Gore Vidal and Tinto Brass’ intended version to the screen. Given that Vidal and Brass had very different interpretations of what the film should be, that sounded like quite an achievement.

My other question mark over the new version is the boast that every single frame of film used has never been seen before – that each scene is a different take, freshly discovered. Perhaps if your main intention is to simply start from fresh, that makes a sort of sense – though it sounds rather more like there is now a fourth person imposing his vision on the film, in this case, the restorer/editor Thomas Negoven. Are we to really believe that every single scene in the original film was inferior to those not used? That Guccione – and make no mistake, this version is effectively a diss of everything Guccione did and perhaps even stood for – chose the worst versions of every shot? Certainly, there are scenes in the original film that are bad takes, truncated moments and compromised moments to allow new dialogue to be dubbed. But to suggest that every shot needed to be replaced seems extreme, especially when the new version uses so many clearly inferior takes. This is especially notable in the death of Tiberius, where the supposedly expired emperor can be seen breathing and moving his legs about. Did no one notice this or was this the only other take of the scene – powerfully effective in the original version – available?

Calling the film The Ultimate Cut is nothing if not an act of hubris. Why ‘ultimate’ rather than ‘alternative’ or ‘new’ or even ‘remixed’? Perhaps for the same reason that Negoven chose to use entirely different takes throughout – a way of not only dismissing everything done before but of claiming authorship. Calling this the ‘ultimate’ edition suggests that he believes that his version is superior in every way to both the original theatrical version and the re-edited Imperial Edition. This is a belief that will only work if people are unfamiliar with those previous versions – either because they haven’t seen the film for ages or more likely haven’t seen it at all and only know it through reputation. It suggests a level of egotism that makes Guccione seem modest and self-effacing, especially as the resulting film turns out to be everything that people have long criticised the original for. Not the explicit sex, obviously – though I’ll come back to that in a moment – but the disjointed narrative, the scenes that go on for too long and a sense of boredom that sets in as this nearly three-hour version plods on.

There are several problems here. Let’s begin with the main point of the project, the alleged reconstruction of Vidal’s vision. This was clearly a nonsense from the start. The only material available was that shot by Brass, and Brass had already reinterpreted Vidal’s script to make it more absurdist and darkly comical. The film still includes the ‘Simon says’ scene that Malcolm McDowell and Ted Whitehead wrote with the encouragement of Brass, which was the final straw for an already frustrated Vidal. What’s more, Vidal’s script called for small, claustrophobic sets and much of the rewriting came about because Donati instead delivered huge, theatrical sets that filled massive sound stages. Frankly, the only way that anyone could reconstruct the film to even come close to Vidal’s concept would be to only use tight close-ups and CGI in new backgrounds, while also removing all the humour and adding in more gay sex scenes. In short, it couldn’t be done.

This new version is as in thrall to Donati’s sets as Brass and Guccione were, though it presents them less effectively. People have long criticised the original cut for lingering on wide shots for too long but this version is full of what are clearly coverage takes that go on forever, with the sets – particularly the scenes in Tiberius’ grotto – shot from so far away that they feel like dioramas plonked on a plain background. At times, the sets don’t seem to reach the end of the frame, which might be why these shots weren’t used to begin with.

This new version is full of scenes where the dialogue demands a close-up but we don’t get one because that footage presumably wasn’t there in the additional material. So we get wide shots of the characters in the distance while important dialogue is spoken, where it cuts to someone just as they finish speaking and where the editing seems incredibly random. The original film was massively compromised but at least had the benefit of being partially edited by Brass and then worked on by other editors whose brief wasn’t “ignore all that footage and only use this”. The claim that this new version somehow repairs the post-production chaos of the original is a case of hype over reality.

What is included here and what is not seems equally random. We have not been told just how Negoven knew which footage was shot by Brass and which by Guccione – it may have all been kept carefully separated but that seems unlikely. In any case, we lose the pivotal scene where Caligula taunts the dying Nerva and then finishes him off, which is obviously not a Guccione addition, but we keep the glossy softcore close-ups of sapphic Penthouse Pets in the Brides of Isis orgy scene, even though they feel like something Brass probably shot at the insistence of his producer. More notably, the scene still intercuts this orgy with the flirtatious seduction between Caligula and Caesonia when narratively it makes more sense to appear at the end of the scene as passions rise.

Speaking of Caesonia, much has been made of Helen Mirren’s expanded role in this version. She’s been bumped up to second in the credits – above Teresa Ann Savoy, who has a more significant role – but this again feels like hype. We certainly see more of her – in all ways – but with a couple of brief exceptions, these are mostly throwaway moments that add nothing to the film or her character. The idea that this new version gives more depth and importance to her character is rather laughable.

There are as many scenes removed as there are added, and either by design or necessity, others lose their impact. Macro’s execution in the original film is a moment of growing horror that ends in a moment of grotesque brutality. Here, it is rushed to the point that it feels like an afterthought. The introduction of Tiberius has Peter O’Toole badly framed and lacks the raddled, drunken delirium of the original. O’Toole’s vigorous performance is a matter of taste, admittedly, but here it feels neither one thing nor the other – not quite florid enough to be camp, not contained enough to be realistic.

The main stated point of this whole reconstruction is to restore the original vision and correct the editing choices that made the 1979 film so disjointed. Yet this essentially follows the same narrative path as the original film and, more notably, the Imperial Edition, where the biggest narrative shift involves moving the opening pastoral scene of Caligula and Drusilla to a later point in the film. Beyond that, this essentially has the same story as the version that we are used to, simply with several scenes from the Vidal/Brass versions removed and moments of padding that you expect would’ve hit the cutting room floor no matter who was in charge inserted. Moments that felt compromised and missing context in the original – namely Caligula suddenly wandering the streets among the great unwashed after Drusilla’s death – feel equally awkward here.

And then there are the technical issues. “Why does it sound so tinny?” asked my other half early in the film. The reason is that there has been no ADR in this film, at least not in the traditional sense. These previously unused scenes had never been through a post-production polish and so all the dialogue is as recorded on set. It’s been AI-polished to remove background noise but it sounds oddly flat, as if no one even bothered to give it a basic audio fix – something that is hardly difficult these days. But it gets worse. The original film featured Italian actors who were subsequently redubbed by English performers. Because the Ultimate Cut doesn’t use any of that finished material, these actors have had to be freshly dubbed. And oh dear. Macro, once voiced by the inimitable Patrick Allen, talks like a 20-something with an Estuary English accent while Ennia now sounds like a simpering teenager who inexplicably giggles throughout. Both characters have been robbed of any depth and it’s baffling. Surely there are still actors out there who could give these characters a sense of realism? It feels as though the producers either couldn’t be bothered to make an effort or simply went with cheap and easy options.

The new music is a dismal synth score that mostly drones ineffectually. In scenes where characters dance, it feels especially out of place but throughout, it fails to give the movie any dramatic push. People remember the awkward use of Prokofiev and excerpts from Aram Khachaturian’s Spartacus ballet, but the original score by Bruno Nicholai (under the pseudonym Paul Clemente) had a power and gravitas that is entirely lacking in this new version.

Why, then, is this being pitched as reflecting Vidal’s vision? Well, for one thing, he is the most respectable of the protagonists in this story. Guccione was a pornographer and Brass was fresh off Salon Kitty – and would go on to make nothing but extravagant erotic movies for the rest of his career. Vidal, though, was the intellectual literary giant. It makes more sense to use his name if you are striving for respectability and trying to suggest that your new version of the film is vastly superior to anything we’ve seen before. But it’s essentially bullshit. The only way to make Gore Vidal’s Caligula would be to shoot an entirely new film using his screenplay – which would be more than possible, as it was originally conceived to be a much lower-budget movie than the final film became. Doing that, though, might open you up to more direct comparisons to the original. Few people are going to do back-to-back comparisons of The Ultimate Cut and the other versions – who has the time to sit through the best part of nine hours of what is effectively the same film to compare and contrast – but they might compare a completely new film to an existing movie.

The opening text of the film pompously claims to present Caligula “as it was performed in Rome in 1976”, to which I can only say: just fuck off. This pompous idea that the people involved in this new edition not only know better but somehow are more creative than Brass or Guccione – not to mention Nicolai, Giancarlo Lui or the voice actors who have been replaced – is something that would be hilarious if it wasn’t so insulting.

Make no mistake – this is nothing more than a vanity project that hopes to succeed because audiences are unfamiliar with the original movie beyond its negative critical reputation – a reputation based entirely on snobbery, prudishness and jealousy. If this version sends people to the original film and allows it to be reassessed – something that has already taken place to a degree, though the myths remain firmly in place and it is hard for anyone to get past their expectations – then that is at least something. But for those of us hoping for a fully restored version – one that follows the Brass-approved shooting script and includes the additional scenes found in both the Italian and UK releases of the film, not to mention both the existing outtakes and the missing scenes that appear here – this Ultimate Cut probably kills off the possibility of that ever happening. Thanks a lot.

Caligula is too good for this edit to be completely awful. People unfamiliar with the previous versions may well enjoy it more than I did, given that there will be nothing to compare it to. But you know what? This feels like the worst sort of cover version – one that superficially resembles the song that you know and love, but which has had the heart and soul torn out of it to make it more acceptable to the masses. It’s a bland imitation that takes a boundary-pushing collision of art and excess and makes it very, very inoffensive. What a waste of time and money.

Caligula: The Ultimate Cut is in UK cinemas 9 August from Vertigo Releasing 

DAVID FLINT

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