Caligula: The Ultimate Cut
Even in this newly restored version of Tinto Brass’s infamous “Caligula,” you can still tell this was produced by a man for whom making a historical drama was secondary to depicting female nudity and sexual depravity. Producer Bob Guccione, he of Penthouse fame, wanted to make a serious erotic film, ambitions that grew bigger when writer Gore Vidal delivered a script about the rise and fall of the titular Roman Emperor. But smut got the better of Guccione, who took the film away from Vidal and director Tinto Brass, added unsimulated sex with porn stars, and the result was a long-derided disaster.
Author and historian Thomas Negovan is the mastermind behind “The Ultimate Cut,” as he located close to 100 hours of footage, and used it to create an entirely new version of the film, attempting to use all never-before-seen takes of scenes, and bringing contemporary effects and music to the process of restoration. (Including AI to restore dialogue performances long thought unusable.) The resulting film was fascinating to watch, even if it still suffered from an overabundance of nudity and revealing costumes that, sometimes, got in the way of the narrative. I was surprised how engaged I was in this now 178-minute film.
As Caligula, Malcolm McDowell holds the screen every moment he is on it. The son of Tiberius Julius Caesar (Peter O’Toole), he is ready to take control of Rome now, and not wait for his father’s death. Immediately, his debauchery is revealed to us when we see him in bed with his sister, Drusilla (Teresa Ann Savoy). When we first meet Tiberius, he is in a pool with a bounty of women near him, even as his face seems to be badly deteriorating. Rome’s decadence only accelerates when Tiberius is murdered, and Caligula becomes emperor. He keeps Drusilla nearby, but marries prostitute Caesonia (Helen Mirren) to give him an heir, all while finding ways to keep those whom would threaten him at bay.
There’s not a lot more to the story than what’s above. Sure there are complications, but the film- as put together by Negovan from Brass’s and Vidal’s original work- is more about scenes that create an atmosphere of increasing paranoia, sexual energy, humiliation, and absolute power for Caligula. The mood is ominous, unsettling, and sensual in equal measure, goosed on by a new score by Troy Sterling Nies that makes this very ’70s production feel alive for the modern age. The performances do benefit, I think, from this re-edit, centering the actors in the middle of the momentum of the scenes compared to being foreground distractions to the nudity. I will admit that I’ve never watched any of the previous edits of the film through; I am a bit curious as to how they stack up to this one, though given what we know of the contentious production the film underwent, I can imagine it’s a significant step down. I don’t know that “Caligula,” with its varied collaborators and their motivations, was ever going to be a great film, but I think Negovan- by starting from scratch- created a version of it that, while not great, is at least worthy of study in how to make a film where sex, violence and politics are all jockeying for position. For a modern age where sexual escapades and violence and hopelessly intertwined to the modern political cycle, it might be a film worth considering now.
