As you’re watching Caligula: The Ultimate Cut -- and I heartily recommend watching it – keep an eye on Peter O’Toole. Playing Augustus Tiberius, emperor of Rome and kind-of mentor (more fool he) to the soon-to-be mad emperor Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, aka Caligula (Malcolm McDowell), he provides a perfect roll model for his young ward. His face riddled with syphilitic lesions, he rants, he rages, he casually slaughters his underlings and presides over a grand hall where naked participants engage in pretty much every kink imaginable, save maybe nose bondage (but that may have been going on in the background and I missed it). O’Toole makes a lavish feast of the role, throwing out all the stops and chewing up the scenery with carefree abandon.
He is, in many ways the living embodiment of Caligula: The Ultimate Cut: Intense; delirious; uninhibited. Constructed from rediscovered footage of the 1979 film’s original shoot – apparently not a single frame from the original, Tinto Brass-directed (mostly) and producer Bob Guccione-defiled version was used here – this new rendition rescues a once-reviled calamity, and with the help of some digital magic to erase the corner-cutting and the addition of an ominous, ambient score by Troy Sterling Nies, reveals the insane pageant this always should have been.
I am not sure how much of this hews to Brass’ original vision (the credits pointedly note that this version is “Adapted from an original screenplay by Gore Vidal”), but what we get here is a giddy blend of eros, horror, melodrama, and farce, the kind of thing that could only have been made in the twilight of the 70’s, before the industry was completely subsumed by corporatized blockbusters. Historical accuracy isn’t the point here (not unless Caligula actually did conduct affairs of office astride a giant rocking horse), wild excess is. Brass frequently keeps his camera back, framing Caligula, his sister and lover Drusilla (Teresa Ann Savoy) and his baby mama and eventual wife Caesonia (Helen Mirren – and by the way, this is one of those films where you know that any woman who turns up will be showing her tits before the final credit crawl) within vast tableaus of carnal activity or bloody deprivation. This kind of thing can get wearing after a while, especially given this version’s three hour runtime, but the tale of a young tyrant slipping inexorably into madness (and to be fair, he was already pretty loopy to start), with its political machinations and interpersonal turmoil, puts enough meat on the bone to give all the X-rated pageantry some solid ground.
I get the feeling the original intent here was to out-Satyricon Frederico Fellini’s Satyricon. In terms of sensual grandeur, that goal was clearly met (even if an early scene between Caligula and Drusilla features some folding screens that were clearly acquired during an emergency run to the local Bed Bath and Beyond). What’s missing is Fellini’s barbed empathy for the foibles of the human condition. Brass gets the moral deprivation right, but lacks the sardonic insight that would add a wicked sting to all the atrocities. Meanwhile, sequestering the narrative largely to the luxurious world of Rome’s elites delivers the spectacle in bucketloads, but loses a bit of needed contrast. We get only a brief glimpse down in the streets where the common folk dwell, and that’s not nearly enough, particularly since Brass seems to be hinting at issues of class, and musing about the people who manipulate such a system to slake their own desires.
That’s clearly not Caligula: The Ultimate Cut’s main mission, though. The goal here is to stun, to startle, to outrage, and that it does with admirable abandon. It may have taken forty-five years for the film to reveal its true magnificence, but the wait, it turns out, was worth it.