[COLUMN] Even in The Ultimate Cut, Caligula is Too Much - But That's the Point | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Caligula: The Ultimate Cut.

Between the premiere of Those Who Are About to Die and the looming release of Gladiator 2, it feels like the Roman Empire is on the collective mind this year. It even reverberates through recent genre efforts like Alien: Romulus or Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, in which a maniacal monkey monarch (Kevin Durand) declares himself “Proximus Caesar.” As such, it feels like a fortuitous time to release a restored edition (The Ultimate Cut) of Tinto Brass’ infamous late 1970s folly, Caligula, which is rolling out across cinemas.

Roman epics occupy an important place in the Hollywood canon. In fact, the genre is very strongly tied to a particular moment in movie history, the 1950s and early 1960s studio system. These epics are typified by movies like Ben-Hur or Spartacus, which imprinted themselves on the cultural psyche. However, while these Roman epics are indelibly associated with postwar America cinema, they were never as ubiquitous or numerous as the westerns or musicals of the era.

As Alastair Blanshard and Kim Shahabudin note in Classics on Screen, “The Roman epics of post-war Hollywood cinema have been so dominant in creating popular perceptions of the ancient world that it is surprising to discover how few there actually were: it is a struggle to list a dozen between Quo Vadis in 1951 and The Fall of the Roman Empire in 1964, even including such borderline examples as Mankiewicz's Julius Caesar.” The power of these films derives from more than the number of them.

The Roman epic speaks to both the state of the industry and to the soul of the nation. In the 1950s, they offered a framework for spectacle and scale that allowed cinema to contrast itself with the emerging medium of television. They offered a sense of majesty with which television could not compete, serving as a demonstration of cinema’s power. They were as big as movies could be, often bigger than movies should have been - Cleopatra infamously threatened to destroy a studio.

Perhaps every generation gets the Roman epic that it deserves. Tinto Brass’ Caligula is broadly recognizable as the warped descendent of those classic epics. It was written by Gore Vidal, who was famously one of the writers on Ben-Hur and who had engaged in a war of words with star Charlton Heston about the film’s subversive content. John Gielgud, who had played Cassius in Mankiewicz's Julius Caesar, had a small role here as Nerva, perhaps the film’s most innocent and decent character.

However, Caligula was not a traditional Roman epic. “It should be the first realistic study of the Roman Empire ever on film,” Vidal boasted in 1975, while the film was still in development. It was the product of a very different approach to filmmaking than the conservative studio system that had produced Ben-Hur. It was produced by Bob Guccione, the publisher of Penthouse magazine. The film would feature graphic depictions of sex and violence, unlike any featured in earlier epics.

Caligula is undeniably of its era. Production designer Danilo Donati (who later worked on Flash Gordon) gives everything a proto-’80s sheen, and so the film feels like a stepping stone between Ben-Hur and David Lynch’s Dune. There is a lot of negative space, polished white surfaces and reflective marble. Smoke hangs in the air, suggesting a murkiness absent from those earlier and more sterile adaptations. Flies buzz in the sound mix, suggesting decadence and decay. All of Rome is a rotten corpse, draped in finery.

Of course, this was the late 1970s. Attitudes to sexual and adult content were shifting. In April 1970, Midnight Cowboy became the first (and, to date, only) X-rated film to win the Best Picture Oscar. In 1971, Hugh Hefner co-financed a version of Macbeth directed by Roman Polanski through his Playboy Pictures. Deep Throat was one of the highest-grossing movies of 1972, and became something of a mainstream conversation piece.

The theatrical cut of Caligula is infamous. After Brass wrapped production, Guccione returned to the sets to film hardcore sex scenes which were liberally inserted into the released film, to the shock and horror of everybody involved. The result was grotesque. Ebert famously called it “sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash.” Variety described it as “a moral Holocaust.” There were lawsuits and attempts to ban Caligula. Vidal disowned it, claiming “no connection with the film that was made.”

In its own strange way, it feels appropriate that Caligula would eventually be released (at least in Italy) in 1979. Like Apocalypse Now, Caligula feels like the culmination of a certain style of seventies filmmaking. It is an ode to aesthetic excess, albeit pushed beyond logic, reason and good taste. Caligula exists as a limit case of a certain style of mainstream filmmaking. Certainly, it’s hard to imagine any recent major theatrical release that came anywhere near the film’s provocations.

Under the oversight of Thomas Negovan, The Ultimate Cut is a complete restoration and reinvention of Caligula, compiled from mountains of material. “What is coming out is not a re-edit so much as a new film,” claimed lead actor Malcolm McDowell. “There’s not one frame of the Guccione Caligula, the old one.” It is a remarkable accomplishment, a very earnest attempt to resurrect the lost visions of Vidal and Brass. Even then, Caligula remains a tough film to recommend.

This is, perhaps, the point. Even with the explicit pornography cut out, Caligula remains a monument to excess and a challenge to good taste. Now, at least, that challenge is more purposeful in its intent and more skillful in its execution. Caligula makes it clear that its title character (McDowell) is engaged in a performance of imperial power to excess, to demonstrate its folly in the hopes that he might find a breaking point - a point at which the degradation and brutality simply becomes too much. How far will Rome go under the leadership of a mad tyrant? The answer, it seems, is “too far.”

Power corrupts, and that corruption only deepens over time as power becomes more entrenched and institutionalized. Early in the film, Emperor Tiberius (Peter O’Toole) finds his old friend Nerva (Gielgud) has slit his wrists in the bath and is waiting to die. Nerva points to Caligula as Tiberius’ successor. “If power was able to destroy the mind and character of my old friend Tiberius, what will power do to this ignorant boy, brought up in army camps, taught nothing but how to be your slave?” Nerva wonders.

Caligula tries to understand its title character’s madness as an act of rebellion against the machinery of the empire around him. After all, Caligula wants for nothing. “Isis loves us,” his wife Caesonia (Helen Mirren) protests. “We have everything. Everything. Why can’t you be happy?” Later, as Caligula subjects his subjects to another round of public humiliation, Caesonia warns the senators are “important men.” Caligula counters, “They must be mad. They say nothing. I don't know what else to do to provoke them.”

Roman epics didn’t just reflect the extravagance of movie-making as an artform but gave voice to national anxieties. America emerged from the Second World War as a dominant global power. It may not have called itself an empire – it was literally “a republic” – but its influence and reach was that of an imperial power. In the postwar era, it became common to compare America to Rome, with the spectre of “the decline and fall” looming in the background. “Empire was once evil,” historian Gregory Aldrete observes, “but now, suddenly, America is the empire.”

“On the one hand Americans could identify with the military and political power of the Romans and the perils faced by that civilization,” explains Carl J. Mora of the Roman epics of the 1950s. “Those Americans who worried about Communist infiltration pointed to the barbarian penetration of the empire's borders; concern about moral decay was compared with the decline of the Roman aristocracy and, consequently, the fall of Rome which held lessons for the United States.”

This comparison was very central to Gore Vidal’s understanding of America. As Michael Lind noted in an obituary for the writer, “Vidal’s long residence in Italy made it easy for him to pose for the cameras in front of the Arch of Titus and other ruins in Rome and play the role of an American Tacitus or Juvenal, whenever European or American journalists asked him to hold forth about the decline of the American empire.” For Vidal, Caligula was not history. It was parable.

Caligula is a story of decline and decay. Early in the movie, Tiberius (Peter O’Toole) guides Caligula through his imperial brothel, suggesting that Rome’s prosperity has brought with it a moral rot. That rot manifests in the boils and cysts on Tiberius’ face, an image of his empire. “When Rome was just a city, we were just citizens, known to one another, you see,” he states. “We were frugal, good, disciplined and dignified. The Romans I rule are not what they were. They lust. They lust for power and pleasure, money, other men’s wives.”

Caligula speaks directly to the era’s anxieties around the abuse of power by the American executive branch. Writing in what would become known as The Anti-Federalist Papers in 1787, the author credited as Cato warned the presidency could become “a Caesar, Caligula, Nero, and Domitian in America.” By the 1970s, that was happening. “The pivotal institution of the American government, the presidency, has got out of control,” argued Arthur Schlesinger in The Imperial Presidency, published during the Nixon administration in 1973.

Caligula was a frequent frame of reference for Richard Nixon in contemporary press. The Washington Post described Nixon’s selection of Spiro Agnew as his vice-president as “perhaps the most eccentric political appointment since the Roman emperor Caligula named his horse a consul.” William F. Buckley accused John Ehrlichman of portraying “Nixon as the ugliest man since Caligula.” Professor James David Barber suggested there was enough evidence of Nixon’s impropriety “to choke Caligula's horse.”

Watching Caligula, it’s hard to completely dispel reports of the end of the Nixon presidency, as Nixon slipped into rampant paranoia, graphic profanity and a constant state of drunkenness. Nixon’s abuse of his power, reflected in his certainty that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal”, resonates in Caligula’s repeated invocation of his own divine authority. In that sense, Caligula is a Roman epic for the post-Watergate era.

In some ways, it feels appropriate that Caligula should be restored and remastered at this particular cultural moment. Once again, comparisons between Rome and America proliferate in the media, in the pages of respected publications like The Atlantic, The New York Times, Politico, and Time. America lives in the shadow of the Trump administration, which has often been framed as a spiritual successor to Nixon’s White House and invites its own comparisons to Caligula.

More than four decades after it was originally released, and in this new restored edition, Brass and Vidal’s Caligula remains an eerily timely parable – just not an especially palatable one.