Caligula – The Imperial Edition (3-DVD Set/Penthouse/Image)
Picture:
C+ Sound: C+ Extras: C+ Film: C+
NOTE: This film has also been issued on Blu-ray and
you can read more about it at this link:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/8109/Caligula+%E2%80%93+The+Imperial
There is
no epic mess more epic than Caligula,
the Penthouse
magazine-produced film (costing anywhere from $11 to 25 Million, but which
would now cost well over $100 Million) that started out (as many such projects
do) with the best of intents, only to become a production fiasco. Bob Guccione was the magazines publisher and
with this project, seemed to have several goals in mind, spoken or not.
For one
thing, Playboy and his arch rival Hugh Hefner had co-produced the very
critically acclaimed and successful Roman Polanski version of Macbeth in 1971. Before his scandals (and even after, if you
think of it), Polanski was a major director whose work on Chinatown (1974) afterwards sealed his reputation as a
groundbreaking filmmaker. Then there was
the hardcore XXX film cycle at the time that kept producing films that set box
office records in the theaters they played.
Most were low budget affairs, though their producers would soon start to
spend unnecessary dollars to complete and be a gaudy as such films were always
considered to be.
Starting
with Gore Vidal’s portrait of bi-sexual and insane Caligula historically,
Guccione saw and opportunity to expand his empire. By talking on Salon Kitty director Tinto Brass, the sex-focused Italian director
of the moment, Guccione thought he could have his own Polanski, outdo Hefner,
mainstream hardcore sex and have a commercial and critical success to boast
about. He even hired name actors like
Peter O’Toole, up and coming Helen Mirren, John Gielgud and especially Malcolm
McDowell hot off of Stanley Kubrick’s A
Clockwork Orange in the title role.
Never would McDowell sell out this persona more than he did here.
However,
some fatal mistakes were made. Brass
though he could be the more heterosexual, more capitalist Pier Paolo Pasolini (a
gay Catholic Marxist!) and even hired his costume designer Danilo Donati (who
had worked with Pasolini and Federico Fellini, plus later of the 1980 Flash Gordon) and editor Nino Baragli
(who had edited many Pasolini films and key Spaghetti Westerns) fresh off of
Pasolini’s last and far superior portrait of debauchery and fascist evil Salo, or 120 Days Of Sodom (1975, which
many believe led to his political assassination made to look like an accident)
leaving Brass thinking he could trump Pasolini.
The next
mistake is thinking that by being more sexually graphic, Brass and Guccione
thought they could top Kubrick and not just by the McDowell/Clockwork Orange connection, but by
imitating the shooting style of Kubrick’s follow-up epic film Barry Lyndon (1975) which had not done
as well as Warner and Kubrick had hoped for.
After so many imitators of Kubrick have come and gone, his influence now
stronger than ever, they had reason to believe they were ahead of the curve,
but they botched that opportunity spectacularly. Instead, it tries to have the clarity of both
Kubrick films, yet still tries to add in the soft diffused light where it can
to look like a Penthouse print layout.
Add the botched sound and picture editing in every version after Baragli
finished what he thought was the final cut and you can forget any success
there.
Finally,
there is the damaging tampering by Guccione, who snuck around and shot six
minutes of hardcore footage without telling anyone thinking he was better at
shooting sex than Pasolini, Brass and Kubrick combined! After all, who dare tell him what to do, he
was the king of the Penthouse Empire and knew sex better than God or Hefner, so
he did his cinematic layouts and thought that would be just enough to
mainstream graphic sex into Hollywood and make him king of film sex, motion and
still. With all the rape controversies
in XXX and mainstream films (i.e., “she’s asking for it and got it” or “she
learned to like it after the initial assault” whether a rape/revenge grindhouse
film or not) building up, he though he would rise the wave to success. Instead, everything would slowly implode
around him.
The
combination of graphic sex and negation of the title character’s homosexuality
(repeated more recently in Oliver Stone’s unfortunate Alexander) drove Vidal to have his name removed, the six XXX
minutes drove Brass to permanently distance himself from the film and though
filming was all but finished in 1976, the film took five years to reach U.S.
screens (to the extent it did) just in time for VHS & Beta to kill XXX film
featured, see the beginning of The Reagan Era which used the film as an example
to go after all sex materials, to see art cinema replaced by Star Wars style blockbusters, to see the
earliest signs of the AIDS epidemic, to see Playboy become a larger empire, to
see other parts of the sexual revolution (minus hardcore) find its way into the mainstream (like “jiggle TV”),
to see the rise of the Punk movement, rise and fall of Disco (with the
troubled, delayed Village People Disco Musical Can’t Stop The Music also bomb) with its backlash aimed at
minorities or anyone seen as supporting them like the Penthouse junta, other
important films move cinema forward enough to leave Caligula’s pretensions behind and see several of its stars publicly
denounce it to boot. That the epic in
this classical-looking form slowly returned in everything from Martin
Scorsese’s Last Temptation Of Christ
to Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, adding
further age to Caligula, as well as
showing what a mess the film is.
So is the
film any good? Was it ever any
good? Could any cut of the film save it
from being more than a sexual and star-driven curio? Now that Guccione has lost control of his
empire, this 3-disc set arrives as if it were a Criterion set, complete wit a
ton of extras and a booklet that intelligently attempts to argue that Brass
might have made a good film if he had been left to his vision and had final
cut. Having seen several versions of the
film now, all the new outtakes and footage here, plus the pre-release cut for
the very first time, then reading about footage missing altogether, even the
most coherent, Brass-authentic cut would not add up to any kind of masterwork
when you are working second generation after masters like Kubrick or
Pasolini. Even if they stuck to Vidal’s
screenplay (though I would like to read the supposedly exceptional final draft
not included here) it would have still be playing second-fiddle to those cinema
masters.
Yes, a
more coherent version is possible with proper editing, shot selection and
proper sound editing and restoration. It
will still look like a dated relic, no matter the ambitions. If the footage legally trapped in foreign
versions could be obtained, we could see what was intended as a kind of dark
comedy, but there is no sing in any way, shape or form that Brass had/has the
talent to put that kind of wit on the big screen. This leaves McDowell’s performance at its
best looking over the top, even when he is giving the producers their money’s
worth.
Oh, and
what is the film about, you say? Well,
it is a study that feels like an epic version of Trivial Pursuit, which
stretches out an evening into months or years.
We can only judge from the two cuts here, because the speculation of the
various versions can never be resolved because the sum of the missing clips and
misfires and bad edited and misdubbings shows that this epic film had no one in
any real control and no one had a clear vision of what this should have been
except maybe Vidal, whose only version only exists on paper with far too much
material unshot. For film and media
persons, a study of the film may prevent future bad filmmaking.
For those
looking for sex and sexual titillation, there is more torture, mutilation and
murder here than actual sex, while there is more nudity (with the cameras
zooming in on boobs, bums, reproductive organs and simulated (plus
non-simulated) acts) than anything else and it becomes tired and silly, as well
as remarkably unerotic, even boring and most unintentionally making everyone
look like moving corpses only distinguished from Romero zombies by blood and
non-rotting flesh. With the current
“torture porn” cycle in the mainstream and al the sexual torture and stupidity
easily found on the Internet all too easily, the almost endless flaws of the
film are more obvious than ever, making it a relic more quickly than any o0f its
greatest detractors could have imagined.
Gielgud
and O’Toole supposedly fled the country to avoid post-production and save their
careers, both of which saw new success after surviving this fiasco, while
McDowell continued to find work and sometimes in good projects like John
Badham’s Blue Thunder (1983 and not the title of a porn film) annoying
Roy Scheider as one of the villains.
Helen Mirren became one of the greatest actresses of her generation,
further relegating the film to secondary status. Pasolini was gone, but Kubrick and others
continued to innovate, while Playboy was far more successful entering the home
video market than Penthouse ever was.
And to think Nicolas Roeg originally was set to direct before Penthouse
became involved.
That
leaves Caligula one of the great
curios that people still talk about, yet cannot explain or explain why. Outside of a few scenes that might shock in
up to 156 minutes that seem more dated than not, the one thing the film does
have going for it is that nothing is a digitally generated graphic. All the costumes and sets had to be built and
they are as massive (and clunky) as D.W. Griffith’s early silent works or that
of the Italian Superspectacles that followed.
Brass was smart enough to put male bodybuilders in the film (back in
1976) before the fitness craze and permanent bodybuilding culture for men in
particular, saving this from seeming too 1970s.
Also, none of the women in any version has breast implants, which does
not make its problems as a period piece worse.
With all
that, it is a bad film everyone should see once, if they are not annoyed, bored
or sickened in the process. Here, you
can try two versions and see if you can get through one of them. Otherwise, it is the ultimate mess of a film
and for being a one of a kind disaster, the curiosity will continue to see the
film reissued on video, with HD up next.
The film did very well in the movie houses it played and might have made
more money at the box office has the film arrived a few years before so it did
not have to compete with blockbuster space, especially since Guccione charged
Roadshow prices (over twice the usual ticket seat price). Home Video and the then power and wealth of
Penthouse kept the film going until it made its money back and became profitable.
It was
never an influential film, it can only be described as the title character
going mad and expressing the madness in sexual violence and yet, it is very
shallow in all this as there is not even the beginning of an attempt of a
character study. Sure, other recent
epics (like Stone’s Alexander, now
available in straight-safe and gay versions, to be blunt) shows that Hollywood
and filmmaking still has major problems with epic biopics in general,
especially where the lead is gay. Even 300, with the all-male Spartans, had to
ignore any homosexuality to be a hit including female love interests. Had Caligula
succeeded on any artistic level, it could have changed that back by the late
1970s. Instead, it ultimately made a
mockery of erotic cinema, epic cinema and with no guiding vision, becomes a
portrait of how bad all the major big budget blockbusters that bomb go
wrong. And there were no toy tie-ins to
swell, no home videos at the time of production, no t-shirts or other
marketing. It was all powered by ego and
money. Caligula is the last pre-Star
Wars epic disaster, especially independently-produced and for good
reason. Now you can see why clearer than
ever, unintended laughs and all.
The
anamorphically enhanced 2 X 1 image (strange ratio) is supposed to be from a
new High Definition transfer, but the print needs some work and the newly
recovered pre-release version may have redder fleshtones, but looks more
naturalistic overall despite have as many flaws as the longer version. That the film had several cinematographers
including the director is no surprise when you look. Then you have the sound here in Dolby Digital
5.0 and 2.0 versions. The 5.0 comes from
the 1999 digital sound reissue of the film and not from any 70mm blow-up, including
some bad looping, loopy uses of Classical Music and even dialogue when you can
see mouths are clearly not
moving. Needless to say the audio shows
its age, especially since it was mostly recorded (and looped) in 1976 - 7.
Extras
are extensive, starting with a small, but text-loaded booklet inside the
DigiPak foldout. DVD 1 adds a set of
theatrical trailers to the longer version that would not get an NC-17 or be
issued as unrated. DVD 2 has a
never-before-seen pre-release version, extensive deleted/alternate scenes
(often also never before seen) including silent footage (with loud music) taken
form a 16mm workprint for which some scenes only survive in that form, Nick
Redman interviewing McDowell on one audio commentary, Nathaniel Thompson
interviews Ernest Volkman (who wrote for Penthouse at the time) on another and
third/final piece with Helen Mirren interviewed by James Ellis Chaffin and Alan
Jones. Volkman’s ends before the film
finishes, but has plenty of dirt dug up on the film. McDowell and Mirren seem happier withy the
film now than then, though Mirren surprisingly seems to have never had a major
problem with it in the first place. DVD
3 stills, 62-minute and 10-minute making of pieces, My Roman Holiday with John Steiner (24 minutes) featurette, Caligula’s Pet: A Conversation with Lori
Wagner (28 minutes) featurette, Tinto
Brass: The Orgy of Power (35 minutes) featurette and a DVD-ROM section
loaded with goodies including several text bios at length, two versions of the
screenplay, novelization of the film and several classic (now vintage) pieces
from the magazine itself on the film.
Guccione
had success in movies before co-producing the original Burt Reynolds/Robert
Aldrich The Longest Yard, but this
was the furthest thing from a football game, though they could both be seen as
prison films we guess. The film is a
disaster, but a one-of-a-kind disaster and though we doubt taking out of its
1970s context is going to “cleanse” it of the counterculture connotation, it is
a fascinating mess that ambition alone with the money and names on the screen
(aside from anything that is or is not shocking sex or violence from a time
that was far less common) are the real reasons to not right it off as a total
wreck. Now, with all the unearthed
footage here for the first time, you can see for yourself what happened. If you must see the film, only settle for
this set.
- Nicholas Sheffo
