How many cuts do we need of a bad movie?

Caligula is a film with a long and storied history.  In the mid-1970s, Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione wanted to follow the lead of his rival, Hugh Hefner, and get into the movie business.  His plan was to make an explicit adult film with high production values, one that could be sold as a mainstream feature film.  He decided that the infamously decadent Roman Emperor Caligula would be the subject of his film.  In order to give the project some gravitas, he accepted scripts from both Lina Wertmuller and Gore Vidal.  Ultimately, he chose to go with Vidal’s script because Vidal’s name had more cultural cachet than Wertmuller’s.  It certainly wasn’t because he liked Vidal’s script, which Vidal later said featured a lot of gay sex but only one scene of heterosexual coupling.

With the promise that Caligula would be a classy production that would push the boundaries of cinematic sex without actually being pornographic, Guccione was able to bring together a truly impressive cast of actors.  Malcolm McDowell agreed to play Caligula.  Helen Mirren was cast as Caligula’s wife, Caesonia.  John Gielgud took on the role of Nerva the philosopher while Peter O’Toole was cast as the diseased Emperor Tiberius.  Guccione offered directing duties to John Huston and Lina Wertmuller.  In the end, no matter how much money he was willing to spend or how distinguished a cast he had assembled, Guccione could not find a prominent, mainstream director who was willing to work with him.  Guccione ended up hiring a director he knew little about, an Italian arthouse filmmaker named Tinto Brass.

Brass proceeded to rewrite Vidal’s script.  Brass’s version of the film featured more sex and less politics.  Guccione was happy about that until he discovered that Brass’s plan was to direct the sex scenes to be grotesque and disturbing.  To his horror, Guccione discovered that Brass was essentially parodying the type of film that Guccione wanted him to direct.  Even when Guccione insisted that the latest “Penthouse pets” be cast in the film, Brass tried to keep them in the background.  As Guccione’s demands grew, Brass responded by refusing to emphasize the ornate and very expensive sets that Guccione had paid to have created.  A working ship was built but Brass reportedly chose to put it in a small warehouse so that there would never be room to get a full shot of it.  Guccione responded by taking the film away in post-production and inserting several hardcore sex scenes, which upset the members of the cast who did not sign on to appear in a pornographic film.

As for the film itself, it must be said that Caligula is probably one of the most historically accurate portrayals of ancient Rome.  The city was said to be a mix of dirty streets and ornate palaces and Caligula certainly captured the mix of beauty and sordid decadence that was the Roman Empire.  The film’s plot actually sticks very closely to what was written about Caligula by Roman historians like Suetonius.  Helen Mirren and Malcolm McDowell both give strong performances, even if McDowell later claimed the film ruined his career by typecasting him as a perverse villain.  Peter O’Toole is memorably grotesque as Tiberius.  Exploitation vets John Steiner and Teresa Ann Savoy also make an impression in their roles and one gets the feeling that they both understood what type of film they were appearing in, even if the bigger names in the cast did not.  There are moments of shocking grandeur and visual beauty to be found in Caligula and also moments of such total ugliness that they are difficult to watch.  In many ways, Caligula is what Guccione wanted.  It’s a big, expensive film that tests boundaries and features explicit sex.

But, Good God, is it ever boring!  Seriously, the scene where Caligula visits Tiberius in Capri goes on forever.  Despite McDowell’s strong performance, Caligula is not a particularly compelling character.  He becomes emperor and then he goes mad.  For over two hours, Caligula does one terrible thing after another and there’s only so long that you can watch it before you just want someone to hurry up and kill him.  The film suggests that Caligula was rebelling against the Roman establishment but, in the end, who cares?  He kills his friends.  He has sex with his sister.  In the film’s most disturbing scene, he rapes a bride and then fists the groom.  It just goes on and on and it gets old pretty quickly.

Still, there’s always been a lot of debate over whether or not it would be possible to make Caligula into a good film.  Bob Guccione claimed that he saved the film.  Tinto Brass disagreed and his director’s cut, which takes out Guccione’s hardcore inserts, is considerably better-paced than the Guccione version but the nonstop ugliness still gets rather boring.

That brings us to the latest version of Caligula, the Ultimate Cut.  Assembled without the input of Tinto Brass or the deceased Bob Guccione, Caligula: The Ultimate Cut played at Cannes in 2023 and was given a limited release by Drafthouse Films in 2024.  It was largely assembled out of unused footage and alternate takes.  I’ve read that not a single fame from the original version of Caligula is in The Ultimate Cut but I don’t think that’s quite true.  (The scene with the giant beheading machine appears to be the same footage that appeared in the original version.)  Caligula: The Ultimate Cut removes all of Guccione’s hardcore footage but it also downplays a lot of Brass’s directorial flourishes as well.  Instead, The Ultimate Cut is said to much more closely follow Gore Vidal’s vision of the film.

Is the Ultimate Cut any good?  It definitely looks better than the previous version of Caligula.  The restoration makes Rome into a very colorful city.  There’s a bit more humor to McDowell’s performance in the Ultimate Cut.  While his version of Caligula still becomes a monster (and the wedding rape is still included in the film), he starts out as a clown whose mission is to humiliate the Roman establishment in much the same way that Tiberius used to humiliate him.  In The Ultimate Cut, Caligula is much more of an anarchist.  At the same time, the Ultimate Cut features a bit less of John Steiner as the duplicitous Longinus and that’s a shame because Steiner’s performance was one of the best in the original version.  As well, Helen Mirren’s performance is stronger in the original version than in The Ultimate Cut.  The alternate takes that were used in The Ultimate Cut often seem to favor McDowell over Mirren.

That said, The Ultimate Cut is still a bit of an endurance test.  Caligula’s meeting with Tiberius still goes on forever and the nonstop evil of his reign still gets a bit dull after a while.  It turns out that Caligula the Anarchist is no more compelling than Caligula the Madman.  Brass and even Guccione may have had a point with the original version of Caligula.  Caligula is a film that requires a truly sordid and shameless sensibility to be interesting.

In the end, it’s hard not to feel that all of this could have been avoided if Gemellus had been named emperor.