No matter how scorned by one generation of film critics and/or filmgoers, once a movie is finished and preserved for all time there’s always a chance of “rediscovery” and reevaluation by film fans of the future.
“Lost” films come back to life, flops are revived as “classics” as more sober-minded assessors weigh in once the furor and stain of notoriety have faded.
“Caligula” starred Malcolm McDowell, an elite talent hot off of “A Clockwork Orange,” and three future Oscar winners — Peter O’Toole, Helen Mirren and John Gielgud. It was scripted by acclaimed novelist and screenwriter Gore Vidal, who had a hand in “Ben Hur,” “The Best Man” And “Is Paris Burning?”
Director Tinto Brass (“Yankee” and “I Am What I Am”) had won respect in Italian filmmaking circles.
But when the film — released and yanked, re-edited and re-released — finally arrived in theaters, all anybody wanted to talk about was its Penthouse Magazine touches, the graphic depravitity, the sex and omnipresent nudity and sexually transgressive nature of it all. Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione produced it, and fired Tinto Brass to shoot additional “dirty” stuff and edit it in ways that played-up the titillation.
Reviews were brutal. Vidal demanded that his name be taken from the script, and the editor and composer did the same. If you wanted to get most anyone in front of or behind the camera red in the face in later decades, all you had to do was mention the title.
Was it really that awful? A new “ultimate cut” restoration, putting the film back as Brass and Vidal et al wanted it, removing some of Guccione’s excesses, promises to let us see how to looked when it premiered in Italy before Guccione took it over and invites us to rethink “Caligula.”
What I remember about it, never having sat through the many cable TV servings of it O channel-surfed by over the ensuing decades, is that I had to cross a picket line at the Manor Theatre in Charlotte, N.C. to see it.
Yes, it was picketed.
The beheading tank, a vast rolling scythe invented for the film as a means of delivering”entertaining” executions by God-Emperor Caligula (born in 12 CE, assassinated in 41, CE) struck me as particularly revolting.
All the breasts, bare bottoms and penises deployed here had a numbing effect in the theater.
And Matthew McDowell, in the title role, summed up the film with repeated references to his need for more stimulus in his depraved (not wholly endorsed by historians) life.
“Dull, dull, DULL!”
But how do memories of this abortion — featuring an actual live childbirth (three pregnant extras were employed to achieve this) — compare to experiencing it anew, “restored?”
Vidal was right to try and take his name off this, as the script is trite, disorganized and tin-eared. The day may come when all that we remember Vidal for are his contributions to films (he added the gay subtext to “Ben-Hur,” he claimed) and his feuds with Truman Capote and others.
If there’s a more insipid, oft-repeated line than “I hope I’m not interrupting,” I am at a loss to recall it. And deploying it while “interrupting” Caligula’s sexual dalliance with his sister Drusella (Teresa Ann Savoy, all but forgotten now) isn’t “cute.”
The vast majority of shots are held several seconds after their payoff, a pronounced and obvious flaw in the early acts, an insufferable agony in the later ones. Editor Nino Baragli (“The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” “Mediterraneo” can’t have wanted that.
Perhaps that’s the work of director Brass, an uncredited editor here. Let the record show that Tinto Brass never made a great or good film, before or after “Caligula.” Restoring this picture doesn’t change that dubious track record.
The sets, from the grottos of Capri to “The Glory that was Rome,” look like tacky, over-decorated soundstage versions of TV productions of the era.
And never has the addition of buzzing flies on the soundtrack seemed more superfluous. The film is ugly and the picture just reeks, and pretty much has from the start.
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