Caligula, the film that nobody liked

Like a cat has nine lives, the Caligula Tinto Brass is reborn from its ashes again through a “final montage” (ultimate cut) of 178 minutes containing a quantity of unpublished scenes found in archives, more respectful of the origins of the project, and purged of the pornographic scenes which had been added without the consent of the artisans by the producer Bob Guccione, founder of the magazine Penthouse.

It is this version restored by art historian Thomas Negovan that will be presented for three days starting this Friday at the Cinéma du Parc, as part of its Minuit au Parc program, which offers cult films to watch until late at night.

The historical plot is thin: it is the year 37, and Caligula (Malcolm McDowell), after having assassinated the emperor Tiberius (Peter O’Toole), reigns over Rome surrounded by his sister Drusilla (Teresa Ann Savoy) and his wife Caesonia (Helen Mirren). Until his fall, it will be nothing but murder and debauchery.

Let’s recall the context: in the 1970s, sexual “liberation” was in full swing, people were fond of sulphurous and subversive films. The Italians were good at that: Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom, Pasolini’s anti-fascist pamphlet, the Casanova by Fellini, The Last Tango in Paris by Bertolucci…

The boundaries between adult films and XXX cinema are blurring, it is also the golden age of exploitation cinema. We queue up (ha ha) to see Deep Throat by Gerard Damiano – it is a social phenomenon when a porn movie becomes a popular film. When Caligula was released in theaters (1979 in Italy, 1980 in the United States), it was a scandal, censorship got involved, critics demolished the film, which still made a good profit, even though it cost a small fortune as an independent production.

Nobody knows it yet, but this frenzy of collective lust will end with the arrival of AIDS and video clubs where porn will be relegated (before the internet), losing its desire to marry the seventh art.

Marc Lamothe, co-director general of the Fantasia festival, who is very fond of Italian cinema from this period, has precious local memories of this cursed peplum, which he saw in Montreal when it came out. Caligula had a reputation as a “sex movie” and to undo this stigma, we rented repertory cinemas all over North America, he explains. In Montreal, the distributor rented the Cinéma de Paris, where Caligula was shown every four hours, 24 hours a day, for a month. And the ticket cost $10! ​​The only other movie that had the same strategy was Apocalypse Now by Coppola.

On the other hand, no matter the versions of CaligulaMarc Lamothe never liked this film, which he considered deadly boring – and I don’t blame him. I myself discovered Caligulawith great embarrassment, in the porn section of the video store where it had to be found. This curiosity came from its bad reputation, and from the fact that it was worn by Malcolm McDowell, who had been a hit in the film A Clockwork Orange by Kubrick – with Caligulawe can say that his image as a villain has been confirmed.

Nightmarish filming and ego war

But Caligula is an unpleasant film, let’s say it, very far from being titillating for those looking for a little eroticism. Under the pretext of showing the fall of the Roman emperor, we allow ourselves all the outrages. “If Coppola said ofApocalypse Now that it was not a film about Vietnam, but THE Vietnam, notes Marc Lamothe with a laugh, we can say that Caligula is not a film about the decadence of the Roman Empire, IT IS decadence!

A nightmarish shoot that lasted for years and an ego war between Bob Guccione, Tinto Brass and the screenwriter Gore Vidal will make the latter two refuse to have their names in the credits. Because the producer, horrified by the director’s Dantesque ambitions, will shoot pornographic scenes separately that will be inserted into a completely different montage.

In truth, no one likes this film, neither its artisans, nor its actors embarrassed to have this stain on their CV, nor the critics, nor the public, except for lovers of cinematic eccentricities. But everyone wanted to see it anyway.

“We knew that this film would never be shown on TV, video clubs did not yet exist, we could only see it in the cinema, which explains the scale of the phenomenon,” says Marc Lamothe.

Orgies filmed in very wide shots in sumptuous settings (which will later be used for filming dirty films), an extremely slow pace, McDowell in manic mode throughout, very little natural light, everything is gloomy, and there is even a real childbirth scene! We really wonder what Helen Mirren (in one of her first important roles), Peter O’Toole and Sir John Gielgud were doing in this mess.

“It’s a mixture of brutality, art and cruelty, all pitched At the same time, Marc Lamothe believes. I find it a flat film played by spoiled children, no one has any feelings, we watch people destroy each other in every scene. But it remains a strange beast whose pleasure is to talk about it.

Still, this new edit restores, in his opinion, the actors’ performances, especially Helen Mirren, who we see much more than in the first version. “It’s still a three-hour film, it’s the same story, not quite the same shots, the music is exceptional, the new credits are magnificent, but almost 50 years later, is it interesting? I don’t know, except that it remains a big curiosity.”

You have been warned: Caligula: The Ultimate Cut is to be viewed at your own risk.

Caligula: The Ultimate Cutat the Cinéma du Parc, on August 23, 24 and 25. The new version of the film will also be available to rent on Apple TV from October 15.