Here it is, in all its seedy absurdity and shame-filled grandeur, the controversial 1979 Romesploitation shocker Caligula, originally released towards the end of the movies’ porn-chic period. It is about the rise and fall of obscene tyrant Caligula, the Roman emperor who married his sister and ennobled his horse. It is now rereleased in an extensively reconstructed and restored form, with a wittily designed new opening title sequence showing an animated Malcolm McDowell doing the “Caligula” dance.
This is the version originally envisaged before producer Bob Guccione took over at the editing stage and tried to raunch the whole thing up for commercial purposes by adding extraneous porn footage, which infuriated the director Giovanni “Tinto” Brass – hardly, as they say, a choirboy in these matters – and screenwriter Gore Vidal. Both wanted their names taken off the credits. Had he been around today, I suspect Vidal might well have whimsically announced he still wanted his name removed; he originally told interviewers he saw Caligula as an essentially ordinary person corrupted by power and fate and said that his preferred casting in the lead would be a young Mickey Rooney in clean-cut Andy Hardy mode.
Leaving in the spurious porn might actually have added to the film’s time-capsule value. You have to imagine yourself watching it in the huge, echoingly empty Empire cinema in London’s Leicester Square in 1980 among a matinee-scattering of filth enthusiasts disappointed and irritated by its relative tameness. You might have also possibly been disappointed and irritated by its lack of subtlety compared to the far superior 70s BBC TV drama I, Claudius; this featured John Hurt as Caligula, his career shrewdly and indirectly shown via the unholy innocent and imperial successor Claudius, played by Derek Jacobi (Giancarlo Badessi plays a pretty forgettable Claudius here). In addition, leaving in the spurious porn might have let us reimagine the Guccione Caligula as conceptual art: Roman decadents haunted by prophetic indecencies yet to come.
Well, this spruced up version certainly hangs together as a kind of sub-late-Fellini dark erotic reverie, and I admit it has ambition and reach, though tinged with a cynicism and violence that Fellini would never have countenanced. There is a rather amazing execution sequence in which Caligula, positioned on a forward-moving red platform, looks on as a grotesquely circular scythe device inexorably advances to behead supposed traitors buried up to the neck. And it has to be said there is a big intentional laugh when Caligula, at a moment of crisis which needs his personal attention, snaps to an attendant: “Take my horse to his own room.”
McDowell’s extraordinary cruel-cherub face makes him a very vivid villain and he is giving it everything he has, but he is surrounded by actors who are doing the ancient-Rome equivalent of phoning it in: writing it on a scroll and handing it over. Helen Mirren is poutingly sensual as his wife Caesonia; she has an amazing “birth” scene, but she’s given nothing much to work with elsewhere. British-born Teresa Ann Savoy, a veteran of adult-themed Italian movies of the era, is self-conscious and subdued in the potentially explosive and transgressive role of Caligula’s sister Drusilla (looking back, that should have been Mirren’s role). Peter O’Toole is roisteringly over the top as Tiberius, but most weird is surely John Gielgud as Nerva, Tiberius’s sorrowing and disapproving courtier in Capri. Gielgud has an expression of infinite pain, a kind of eternal suppressed wince, perhaps of his own pain at being involved in this film.
The death of Drusilla makes for a break in the proceedings (an old-fashioned intermission in fact) and then Caligula, having mingled incognito with the despised public, returns to behave ever more bizarrely until his inevitable gruesome assassination, quite without the historical import of the first Caesar’s end. This Caligula was very much as eroticism was imagined at the time, and that monastic droning that accompanies the group-sex scenes is not unlike the ambient orgy sound in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. It all makes for something startling, amusing and bizarre.
• Caligula: The Ultimate Cut is in UK and Irish cinemas from 9 August.
