Controversial movie Caligula re-cut utilizing unseen footage

Despotic, debauched and deranged: the Roman Emperor Caligula was a cruel sadist who reputedly slept with all three of his sisters and wanted to make his horse a consul.

He was also so touchy about his bald spot that if he saw anyone standing on higher ground than him, looking down on it, they were sentenced to death.

He was similarly sensitive about his excessive body hair and declared that if anybody ever mentioned goats in his presence, whatever the context, they too would die. Yet for his insane levels of depravity, Caligula surely ranks as the ‘GOAT’ (greatest of all time) – a term we can safely use since the emperor’s assassination in 41AD aged just 28.

It comes as no great surprise, therefore, that the 1979 biopic Caligula, starring Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, John Gielgud and Peter O’Toole – produced and bankrolled by Bob Guccione, the American founder of the soft-porn magazine Penthouse – remains perhaps the most controversial and notorious movie ever made.

For years it was banned in numerous countries (Belarus is the only one still holding out), while many cinemas that did show it on its global release in 1980 were picketed by enraged ‘morality’ campaigners.

It was lambasted by US critic Roger Ebert as ‘sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash’. On this side of the Atlantic, critic Leslie Halliwell called it ‘a vile curiosity of interest chiefly to sado-masochists’.

The film’s writer, novelist Gore Vidal, and director, Tinto Brass, were inclined to agree. They both disowned Caligula after Guccione, without their knowledge, inserted hard-core scenes of unsimulated sex.

Now the film – assessed more generously by one of its stars, Helen Mirren, as ‘an irresistible mix of art and genitals’ – is making a comeback. This week sees the release of Caligula: The Ultimate Cut, which at a shade under three hours is 22 minutes longer than the original.

In one of the film’s graphic orgies, during which a naked man walking on enormous stilts is one of the more prosaic spectacles, Caligula (McDowell) declares that if anyone ‘lasts’ more than three hours he will give them a clay phallus as a special prize for endurance.

Such endurance may be required for Caligula: The Ultimate Cut, although the whole point of it is that it’s a considerable improvement on the original. It is an extensive reconstruction, the result of painstaking work by American film historian Thomas Negovan, who has not used any of the 1979 footage at all but instead re-cut the film from 90 hours of unseen material that was gathering dust for decades in a Hollywood warehouse.

Negovan’s intention was to honour the vision of Brass, the director, which was junked when Guccione had his wicked way with the film.

Brass had wanted to depict Caligula as a well-meaning, fair-minded young man gradually and shockingly corrupted by power, not as the deviant lunatic he turned out to be pretty much from the start, after succeeding his great-uncle and guardian, Tiberius (O’Toole), as emperor.

Mirren’s role as Caligula’s highly-sexed wife Caesonia has also been beefed up. When the movie was first shown at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, Mirren was well down the list of credits, not far above Bonnie Dee Wilson and Valerie Rae Clark, both Penthouse ‘Pets of the Month’ who were billed as ‘Imperial Brothel Workers’.

She featured for only nine minutes. Now she’s in the film for an hour, looming large in the third act as just about the only person in the imperial court who dares to stand up to the monstrous emperor, played compellingly by McDowell as a kind of evil version of camp Mr Humphreys in the 1970s TV sitcom Are You Being Served?

The new manifestation of the film certainly shows a great deal more nuance than ever interested Guccione, who really just wanted to make an extravagant porn flick.

Now 81, McDowell has embraced the new version, after long ago rejecting the original, which he felt derailed his career, as ‘a betrayal of the actors’. Mind you, there isn’t much Negovan can do about some of the leaden acting, and lumpen, expository dialogue. For example, bored with life in Rome, Caligula grumbles: ‘No wars, no catastrophes, nothing … it’s been ages since we had a proper earthquake.’

Still, the grandiose, almost operatic sets are spectacular. And the action that startled audiences all those years ago has not lost its power to shock, in particular a scene in which a manic, wide-eyed Caligula rapes both a bride and groom, the luckless Livia and Proculus, on their wedding night.

At least Negovan has left out the subsequent castration of Proculus, another scene which revolted cinema-goers. But the nudity looks just as gratuitous as it ever did. Caligula’s sister (and lover) Drusilla, for example, played by Teresa Ann Savoy, wears a toga artfully designed to have a single breast popping out at all times.

Nevertheless, Caligula more than deserves its footnote in cinematic history. In 1979 it was the most expensive independent film ever made, and while Mirren’s mighty reputation was yet to build, Gielgud and O’Toole – neither of whom pretended to have taken their roles for any reason other than a fat fee – were already powerhouses of stage and screen.

So what did they make of it, and why is the off-screen story of Caligula just as rife, if not with bestiality, necrophilia and sado-masochism, then certainly with intrigue, betrayal and hubris, as everything we see chronicled on screen today?

Guccione, a former altar boy who had considered going into the priesthood, was a fast-talking New Yorker, a Sicilian-American with a penchant for open shirts and gold medallions. He founded Penthouse in 1965 and engaged his bitter rival, Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner, in what became known as the ‘Pubic Wars’, each trying to out-centrefold the other.

It was partly because Hefner had not succeeded in the movie business that Guccione yearned to do exactly that. He wanted to break new ground by making an explicit ‘adult’ film with such lavish production that it would have to be taken seriously.

And although he had been investing in movies for a while, among them Roman Polanski’s 1974 Oscar-winning hit Chinatown, he craved more control.

So when Gore Vidal invited him to fund a film about the most infamously depraved of Roman emperors, he couldn’t resist. Next, on board came Brass, the Italian director fresh from making the Nazi-themed sexploitation film Salon Kitty.

Vidal and Guccione, the patrician and the porn baron, were friends. Vidal called him ‘the Big Gucco’ and introduced him to his pal Princess Margaret.

But as soon as Brass started filming in Rome, egos erupted like Mount Vesuvius. Each man had his own iron-clad notion of what the movie should be.

According to Negovan: ‘Tinto hired thieves and prostitutes, literally. He wanted the salt of life, people with scars and teeth missing, but while he was doing that, Bob was flying in Penthouse Pets. Meanwhile, Gore had in mind the most historically accurate view of Rome ever screened, while [designer] Danilo Donati envisioned a Mussolini-era Rome.’

When Gore said the set reminded him of the lobby of the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami, Tinto barred him (and rewrote the script himself with McDowell and the Liverpudlian dramatist Ted Whitehead, who later worked on the TV series Cracker). The set was not, to put it mildly, a happy place.

O’Toole gave a memorably demented performance as the malicious, syphilitic Tiberius, but he and Brass loathed each other (O’Toole delighted in calling the director ‘Tinto Zinc’) while Mirren said it was like descending to Dante’s Inferno every day.

Somehow they all limped to the end of the shoot, after which Guccione covertly let himself back on to the set with porn actors, filmed them actually having sex, then fired Brass and took over the edit himself.

Horrified at the way the picture turned out, Vidal and Brass both sued to have their names removed, while Guccione fired insults in every direction, insisting that he had never once seen O’Toole sober.

He was perhaps entitled to feel aggrieved; the production had cost him a fair proportion of his fortune. Under the supervision of the spendthrift Donati, 3,592 costumes were made, and 2,000 wigs stitched from real hair. A 175ft-long Roman galley was, to that point, the largest film prop ever built. To nobody’s great surprise, it leaked.

In the event only two of the film’s stars refused to speak ill of it. Mirren might have made daily visits to Dante’s Inferno, but they were lucrative visits. She was paid £40,000 for four months’ work, more than covering the cost of her first house and a swathe of Scottish forest.

And Gielgud, whose character, the political grandee Nerva, kills himself barely 20 minutes into the film, was unapologetically delighted at the age of 62 to be surrounded by so many naked young men.

‘It wasn’t that he was a promiscuous (gay) man,’ McDowell later recalled. ‘It was just that he’d never seen anything like it and he’d been around since time began.’

Gielgud himself gleefully described a scene in a swimming-pool full of naked men and women, who splashed about as the cameras rolled, ‘then, the moment the bell rang for lunch, they all put their hands in front of their genitals and rushed off to have a pizza with their families’.

Caligula was a commercial as well as a critical dud, yet none of the stigma stuck to Gielgud, whose biographer Sheridan Morley wrote in 2001, after the great actor’s death: ‘Critics seemed to assume that in some vague way the film had been shot without his knowledge, and that his presence in the midst of these seedy, soft-porn surroundings must have been some kind of mistake.’

If it was, it was a mistake that Negovan hopes he has finally rectified. Certainly, Caligula is not the film it was. But it is still utterly, histrionically bonkers.

Caligula: The Ultimate Cut is in cinemas now