Caligula: The Ultimate Cut
In 1979, when “Caligula” was released in theaters, it was met with a great deal of hype most of it bad. The production of Penthouse Magazine publisher Bob Guccione’s grand experiment to make an adult film that also contained the ingredients of a typical Hollywood spectacle was so fraught that screenwriter Gore Vidal and director Tinto Brass both tried to have their names removed from the project. When big name actors like Malcolm McDowell, Peter O’Toole, John Gielgud and rising star Helen Mirren found out what Guccione had done after firing Brass and taking over editing himself during post-production going back to the still-standing sets with a skeleton crew and a group of Penthouse models to shoot some hardcore sex scenes that were then spliced into the picture without their knowledge they disavowed it too, and threatened the film with legal challenges around the world.
The reviews upon its release were uniformly terrible Variety called it a “moral holocaust,” and our own forebears dubbed it “sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash. If it is not the worst film I have ever seen, that makes it all the more shameful.” But despite those critiques or perhaps because of them, especially after it hit the then-emerging home video market where even people who hadn’t gotten themselves arrested at screenings could see for themselves what all this fuss was about, the movie was successful. It has acquired something of a cult following over the years, sure but solely out of morbid curiosity about its unique blend of artistic ambition and pornographic content. Although he talked about producing other films in “Caligula’s” wake (one was rumored to be about Catherine), Guccione never did.
But what if he had? What if there really is somewhere among those reported 96 hours of footage shot during this production 96 hours! some good movie? These are the questions raised by “Caligula: The Ultimate Cut,” one of the strangest reclamation projects in the history of film. Producer Thomas Negovan has gone through all that footage and constructed an entirely new version of the picture using alternate takes and cut scenes, while removing every frame of the hardcore footage that more closely adheres to what it was supposed to be.
This overhaul is so extensive that, even though its running time has now been reduced from 156 minutes to just under three hours, “The Ultimate Cut” does not contain a single shot seen in any previous version of “Caligula.”
The outcome differs from what was before and, in many cases, much better. This time viewers can appreciate more of the often breathtaking costume and production design work provided by the great Danilo Donati (who had collaborated with Fellini and Zeffirelli among others, and would later do the sets and costumes for “Flash Gordon”), but which were inexplicably downplayed the first time around. McDowell’s performance now also presents itself more as a progression, rather than over the top madness followed by some shouting. So he is actually interesting to watch this time even when he’s not being a complete lunatic through the whole thing; there are still moments where he looks like Alex from “A Clockwork Orange” doing Mick Jagger karaoke while on stilts, but there are also moments that allow some humanity to come through.
This has an added benefit of not steamrolling Teresa Ann Savoy (replacing Maria Schneider, who allegedly objected to the sexual content) as Caligula’s doomed sister/lover Drusilla in their scenes together. She doesn’t quite get at all of Drusilla’s tragedy mixed with transgression here either though she comes closer but she’s allowed to do better work overall in this version. The other big winner is Mirren, who was only in the original cut for something like 20 minutes but spends much of her time between Caligula’s arrival back in Rome and his assassination running around being awesome (and naked). It remains both the best performance in this film and its only asset that successfully embodies artistic and prurient ambition. (It does make one wonder how much better it might have been if she’d played Drusilla.)
However, while “Caligula The Ultimate Cut” is undeniably superior to what came before it, there are still certain problems so baked into this movie that no amount of re editing could possibly fix them. One of the reasons that Gore Vidal and Tinto Brass started feuding during the production is because they had fundamentally different ideas about Caligula and his reign of depravity namely, whether he had any redeeming qualities to begin with. According to Vidal, he was a decent man driven mad by absolute power, according to Brass, he was born nuts and only got worse once he became emperor. These differences were never reconciled, and so the film never quite figures out what it wants to say about this person or the madness that followed him around for four years. The story makes more sense now than it did back then, but there are still moments where it seems like something important is missing from the narrative as though certain scenes were either not shot at all, or cut before they could be finished.
I don’t really miss Guccione’s pornographic inserts, although they were the only part of the film that could be called notorious and as such I don’t think it should have been dropped entirely; doing so seems like a clumsy attempt to sanitise an otherwise completely tasteless project. But let it not be said that this version of Caligula has been neutered this is a movie that begins with Caligula in bed with his sister and proceeds to take us on a tour through a multilevel sex dungeon before eventually having Caligula put the wives of Roman senators to work as prostitutes on a giant floating brothel fashioned from an inland grain ship used for replenishing the state’s corn dole. Nor are there any less violence, which includes demonstrating an elaborate decapitation machine and famously showing Caligula rape both bride and groom after crashing one of his soldier’s wedding nights. Simply put, you do not want to buy your snacks for this one up front, though it does make you wonder about what kind of commemorative popcorn bucket it might inspire.
In the end, however extensively reworked “Caligula The Ultimate Cut” may be, it does not reveal itself as any sort of unfairly maligned masterpiece deserving rediscovery along Heaven’s Gate or Ishtar lines. This is far from being a film for everyone. Having said that those who meet it halfway on its own very strange sometimes silly terms shall perhaps find themselves agreeing with Helen Mirren’s ultimate judgement when she called it “a brilliant mix of art and genitals”.
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