Michael Atkinson
The salacious folly that was Caligula (1979) has long been consigned to the back alleys of movie lore, forgotten like the memory of a head trauma. It’s also, looking back, a unique fetus-in-a-jar monument to, at the very least, the weird, cosmic glamour of moviemaking, which can make cool heads explode and already-swollen egos somehow come to think they are going to rule the world — by making a movie. It was the ’70s, the days of big-box-office porn films and Erica Jong and newsstands stacked with glossy T&A, and Penthouse magazine magnate Bob Guccione deciding he was going to be the King of All Media by smashburgering DeMille-size historical epicness with his own hairy-chested success in flesh-peddling. We can be thankful, you’d suppose, it wasn’t Larry Flynt.
Guccione burned through his own millions (almost twice what Star Wars cost, making Caligula the most expensive independently made film ever), setting screenwriter Gore Vidal and dick-gripping eroto-auteur Tinto Brass at each other like rumble fish, then adding his own hardcore sequences after everyone else walked — the story of the film’s production could stand as its own saber-toothed Ryan Murphy six-ep docudrama today. (Jeremy Renner as Guccione? Ralph Fiennes as Vidal?) A movie about deranged megalomania couldn’t have been graced with a more manic backstory. Ultimately, in a kind of triumph of scandal publicity over the universal heavings of critics, Guccione ended up turning a profit before his movie even went to VHS.
For us callow movie watchers back in the day, in whatever censored or uncensored version of it you saw during the first Reagan administration, Guccione’s big balloon was simply a mind-melting slog, the worst movie Fellini never made, a slow-motion tanker crash that had us instinctively hitting the brake pedal in the dark. Neither lavish historical epic nor satisfying cosplay porn nova, it maddened everybody, and quickly became a black hole, so to speak, of movie event-ness. Since, it’s been a neglected freak, famous but hidden in our heads like a failed sexual experiment we’d like to pretend never happened. So of course it became, in the age of home video, a dare-to-watch “cult” item, which is not to say anyone would ever admit to “belonging” to such a cult, or to watching it sober.
That was then. Now, something new has happened, and I’m pretty sure never in the long and often lawless history of film distribution and exhibition and archive revisionism has there been something quite like this: not the “director’s cut” no one ever asked for, nor a producer’s new revamp, nor merely a “restoration.” Rather, an American art historian, gallerist, and musician named Thomas Negovan — his filmmaking credits are scant, but they do include being a producer on An Unlikely Fandom: The Impact of Thomas the Tank Engine (2023) — was hired, by whom we’re not sure, to essentially remake or reconstruct Caligula according to Vidal’s original and largely derided screenplay, picking from over 90 hours of Brass-shot footage that has never before seen the light of day. Drafthouse Films — who else? — is rolling this fresh Frankenstein out to 30 American screens as we speak.
(For the nitpickers, yes, Jacques Rivette would occasionally assemble different movies, or versions of the same movie, from the same pool of footage. We’re not in that world.)
So what is this? A rectifying remake, a found-footage assemblage, a historical experiment? There’s still no director credited; Vidal and Guccione are both dead, while Brass, at 91, has helplessly cried foul in public statements, just as he did over 40 years ago. Apparently, a separate Penthouse-sponsored reconstruction had begun in 2018, with Brass’s full support, only to vanish — it’s as if unseen forces won’t let this just-wrong thing die and find a grave. They’re calling this new splooge “The Ultimate Cut,” the hopeful hyperbole of which should begin Guccione spinning in his grave, coming in at 22 minutes longer than the first released version, but minus the anal-oral Penthouse-y detours and money shots, and ending up with a good deal that is very gratuitous indeed. Despite being, in every frame, a brand new film, Negovan’s edition feels very familiar and not all that different from Guccione’s — an observation that will have to go unsubstantiated by a masochistic rewatch of the original, thank you very much.
We have not come to just bury Caligula all over again, but there’s no getting around Brass, whose tastes and artistic ambitions seem to have been fulfilled in his subsequent 30-year career as the silliest softcore-porn clown in Italy. Guccione may’ve been thinking with his balls, but he had the common sense to throw in the penalty flag when he saw the movie stuff Brass was conjuring: the hilarious clutter of lounging nudes and papier-mache phalluses and relentless jugglers; the amateurish circus-act lighting; the massive and farcically designed sets shot head-on in clueless tableaux, as though from the orchestra seats; the helpless actors declaiming their points in hopes that the sloppy zoom shots will find them in time and in focus; the sparkly disco headbands not unlike those memorably worn by John Travolta in Stayin’ Alive four years later.… Add onto this parade the static uninterrupted master shots Negovan had to employ for some scenes, because Brass didn’t shoot enough coverage and close-ups.…
The narrative — essentially unchanged version to version — doesn’t crawl forward so much as get dragged like a clubfoot from set to set, while the tone and mood of the thing are what you’d expect in a sex slaver’s basement. Neither Vidal’s idea of Caligula as a character (corrupted by power) nor Brass’s (pure psychopath) is very insightful, and no ideas at all made their way to star Malcolm McDowell, who earnestly scampers around the stage architecture like a caffeinated middle-grader. If something dramatic or convincing was to happen, it would’ve had to happen by accident. (Accidents did happen, God knows, but to no discernible effect; even a full-frontal birth scene, using several very real birthing moms, looks faked — and who were these women? Do those now-40-something kids know they’re in this film?) Negovan’s edit more than quadruples the screen time of Helen Mirren, as Caligula’s up-for-anything wife, Caesonia, but she’s unsurprisingly wasted in any case, with maybe two dozen dull lines of dialogue. Brass didn’t direct performances, here or anywhere else; he threw nude parties with his hand down his pants.
Caligula completists, rejoice, I guess. Reportedly, McDowell is delighted with this manifestation and its release, while Mirren thought and still thinks the whole thing was a romp. “Well,” you think, as the gold-plated guards are line-dancing at the imperial brothel shaped like a slave ship, “at least Dame Helen had a good time.”