Like personal conversations involving life aspirations and childhood memories, there is an intimate point in film discussions among close friends where I eventually ask what their favorite controversial films are. Answers are relative to perspective (God-fearing people might find Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs to be sacrilegious) and age (middle-school me would have thought that American Pie could only be secretly pirated in the confinements of a locked room of an parent-less house).
It might also depend on how controversy is defined. My mental frontrunners (and stomach acid stirrers) tend to be ones engaged with moral depravity, such as A Serbian Film or The Sadness. So admittedly, I did not clutch my pearls in reading about the calamity behind 1979’s Caligula when, for all intents and purposes, it was Controversial with a capital C. I associate that time period as the formative collision between cinema and pornography making it to the mainstream, but perhaps with many incidents, I just Had to Be There. Billed with names like Malcolm McDowell and Peter O’Toole, audiences may have piled into screens and came out seeing more than what they were asking for. And honestly, as someone who didn’t care for Blonde‘s grotesqueness, it is fair to say that 1) controversy never dies and 2) people who get riled up can never quite retire their pitchforks.
As the story goes, Cailgula’s infamy can largely be attributed to producer and Penthouse founder Bob Guccione. Having supplied the film’s budget that nearly doubled by the end of shooting, Guccione set out to make the film with A-list names as a porn flick backboned by a vague storyline involving the rise and fall of the titular emperor played by McDowell. The script was written by American author Gore Vidal (who had already dealt with mistreatments of his work earlier in the decade), and the film was to be headed under Italian director Tinto Brass (whose salaciousness in films, such as Salon Kitty, had appealed to Guccione). Under Guccione’s mad-power editing and direction, which included flying his Penthouse “pets” to set and disrupting the story with no-holds-barred sexual acts, the final version was disavowed by Brass (who will only be credited as providing “principal photography”), Vidal, and the main stars (Helen Mirren, who was a respected stage actor at the time, described the experience as being “sandbagged”). Upon release, reception was rightfully derisive.
It’s kinda a heartwarming Hollywood tale for most people involved (even for the recently passed Guccione, whose dictatorial hand will redirect the film to a kind of discourse spotlight) that Caligula arrives to the screen in a completely rehashed chariot. The Ultimate Cut premiered at Cannes last year as a redemptive showcase on the film’s original intention. Art historian Thomas Negovan spent three years cutting the near-hundred hours of footage found in Guccione’s mansion to piece together a coherent story. Even McDowell, who has soured from the experience, has given the recut a thumbs up of approval: “Nevogan’s Caligula is very much the movie I thought I was making with Tinto Brass.”
The final result? If you’re looking for an epic Roman spectacle to see with your family, I’d wait until Gladiator 2 this fall. But with its grand embellishment of hubris and autocratic fate, Caligula deserves glory on the big screen, especially with an audience who might come in with a sneaking knowledge of its history or are willing to give it another chance.
Following a failed attempt to assassinate his great nephew Caligula, the withering Roman emperor Tiberius (O’Toole) is emboldened to ensure that Caligula does not sit on the throne once he passes away. Nonetheless, Caligula snakes his way to the crown with the immediate, low-evidence urge to destroy betrayers and dissenters. Other star players, including a bewitching Mirren as Caesania and an “I’m too old for this” John Gielgud as Nerva, are in Caligula’s circus ring of loyalty games and finger-pointing. There are very few moments where you root for Caligula, but there are also very few times where you never want to stop watching. McDowell’s performance is intimidatingly unpredictable, demanding attention and awe because it’s not easy being immorally villainous and entertaining for three hours. His squirrelly, statuesque physicality leans into the role of an impulsive megalomaniac the character requires. Movies like this could be classified into camp in a bad way, and you will know the kind of ride you’re getting into when, in the first scene, McDowell somersaults into bed occupied by his sister and lover Druscilla (Teresa Ann Savoy) and shrieks when a blackbird swoops into the room. But McDowell alone makes Caligula into a piece worthy of a cult following, the kind of totalitarian sass that is humorous and shocking.
All things considered, it’s amusing that the 1979 (un)cut version was whittled to acceptable terms, because there are still a lot of graphic material. A Clockwork Orange is an apt appetizer for this film’s incoming bouts of sexual torture and public shaming. In both films, the depiction of violence belong, though in Caligula, it seems sewn into the fabrics of a doomed society. The production design reflects classical tableaux adorned of hedonism and opulence, which ironically gives Caligula’s tyrannical hand a small part in the scheme of fallen rulers. The background noise, which can be a temple orgy or the congregation of counsel, looks similar to watching the mansion scene in Eyes Wide Shut flattened out in a School of Athens-style scene, matching a kind of biblical accuracy.
While the story is of typical means, the final, intended cut of Caligula is really something to see and behold. It’s not my favorite controversial film, but it is probably one of my favorite comeback stories. The controversy is that there was the essence of good — genuinely good, not in spite of — performance buried underneath a man’s selfish mission. The Caligula of it all.
Caligula: The Ultimate Cut
2023
dir. Tinto Brass
178 min.
Opens Friday, 8/16 @ Somerville Theatre – click here for showtimes and ticket info
