In the 1970s, Bob Guccione — publisher of the porn magazine Penthouse — commissioned a script for a sexually explicit Roman saga from novelist Gore Vidal. He hired Tinto Brass — who’d just made the Nazi chic sexploitation film Salon Kitty — to direct, and an enormously distinguished cast signed up for what seemed likely to become the most epic dirty movie ever made. In 1979, Caligula was released, without credits for its director or writer (who had both stormed off the production), and became a hot potato, especially in the version Guccione supervised, with extra hardcore smut shot without the involvement of most of the A-list actors.
Though billed as ‘The Ultimate Cut’, this three-hour version — which apparently shares no footage at all with any previous releases — seems likely to be the last word on the property. Restorer Thomas Negovan has tried to put together a film closer to Vidal’s script, with previously cut scenes restored and takes which suggest the cast — particularly Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren and Peter O’Toole — were trying for something more complex than previously suspected, even if in black-comic mode.
Bluntly, Vidal saw Caligula as a good man gradually corrupted by power, while Brass treated the Emperor as a pantomime baddie from the outset; here, at last, we can see McDowell was genuinely trying for nuance, and even a bit of tragedy.
In 1979, Caligula seemed late to the orgy, upstaged by the BBC’s landmark 1976 series I, Claudius, which tells the same story. But whatever else it is, the film is sumptuously art-directed and shot — with a strange claustrophobia, which comes from shooting epic orgies and atrocities on vast indoor sets. Animator Dave McKean provides a prologue which introduces the Caligula dance — a Pythonesque sidestep which might now finally catch on.