Caligula: The Ultimate Cut (18) |Close-Up Film Review
Cast: Malcolm McDowell, Peter O’Toole, Helen Mirren
Review by Carol Allen
When Guccione started interfering with their work, writer Gore Vidal and director Tinto Brass removed their names from the film. Now producer and reconstructionist Thomas Negovan has found some fifty hours of footage that never made it to any of the various version and has re-edited the film in accordance with its creators’ original vision, he claims. Vidal died in 2012 but Brass, now aged 90, is reported to be most unhappy, as he had nothing to do with this new version.
Be that as it may, Caligula UC is certainly worth a look. When Guccione took over the original, he apparently cut the performances to ribbons and spiced it up with a lot of porn, in which the main actors never took part. There are in this new version a lot of naked ladies and a few less naked gentlemen but compared to say Damien Chazelle’s 2022 epic Babylon the orgies of ancient Rome look positively respectable compared to those of twenties Hollywood. Enhanced by contemporary technology, the film also looks absolutely gorgeous.
There is also more room now for the actual performers. Malcolm McDowell in the title role uses the beautiful but evil angel persona that was so effective in If and A Clockwork Orange in what is a powerful barnstormer of a performance. The young and never afraid to be sexy as well as bright Helen Mirren is his wife and Teresa Ann Savoy, who left acting not long after making the film because she was fed up with playing sexy roles, is his sister Drusilla, with whom he enjoys a passionate, incestuous relationship. Her death though is somewhat different from that in Robert Graves novel and the 70s tv series I Claudius.
There is also a brilliantly sleazy performance from Peter O’Toole, only in his forties at the time but looking much older here as the dying emperor Tiberius, covered in sores from the syphilis which is killing him and mischievously playing Caligula off against his son Gemellus (Bruno Brive), who is already looking like a lamb due for the slaughter. My sympathies were with the naked slave girl, tasked to follow Tiberius everywhere, who tastes the goblet of wine being offered by her master to Caligula and drops down dead. That’s ancient Rome for you. While on a Roman fashion note, the brightly coloured costumes seem to nearly all consist of two pieces of flowing material, one front and one back with nothing joining them together, making it crystal clear to all that the Romans had not yet invented knickers.
I am a bit puzzled though by the claim that the footage is all previously unseen. In some cases for that to be so, Negovan must have used retakes of scenes which were seen back in 1980. For example, while Caligula’s sadistic antics in the film aren’t exactly loveable – his loyal aide Macro (Guido Mannari) for example literally loses his head in a bizarre sadistic circus game created by the emperor – there is an unforgettable and horrifying sequence in which Caligula gleefully rapes both the bride and the groom at their wedding – and it is a scene which those who saw the original film report still remembering.
After that sequence any remaining empathy one might have with Caligula’s going on is gone. It then becomes a matter of just waiting to see what the mad sod gets up to next before he’s bumped off.
