"Too right," you might say, especially if you were Australian. "What other reason to watch Caligula could there be?"
Indeed. It's infamous for its smuttiness. For its artless, gross smuttiness.
When I watched Caligula almost 20 years ago, on Halloween of 2006, I ended up seeing a truncated version of it. It was a lot shorter than I was expecting, somewhere in the neighborhood of 1:45, and had a lot less unsimulated sex in it than I was expecting. None, in fact. Indeed, I figured that version -- the one that famously revolted Roger Ebert and others, the one that so many of the participants were eager to remove their names from, the one that was financed by Penthouse magazine founder Bob Guccione -- was lost to time.
Until I saw that a version of Caligula was on Kanopy, called Caligula: The Ultimate Cut, and it was 2 hours and 58 minutes long.
Hello, unsimulated sex.
Now, I'm not just a perv. If I just want unsimulated sex, of course I can get it in 15 seconds on my nearest web browser. I don't need to watch a movie whose principal photography occurred 50 years ago (released to cinemas three years later). That's even before Debbie Does Dallas.
No, the real curiosity for me was the proximity of the unsimulated sex to a bunch of actors and actresses who have Dame and Sir in front of their names. (John Gielgud and Helen Mirren got that honorarium, though Malcolm McDowell and Peter O'Toole missed out. I would have thought for sure O'Toole was a Sir. The internet tells me it was offered to him in 1987 but he declined.) I just wanted to experience how unusual that would seem.
I tried to experience it in 2006, but the nudity in that film was of a rather generic nature, nothing that would have shocked audiences and critics at the time.
Well, I wasn't going to find that in this Kanopy version either. In fact, I was going to find a version of Caligula that isn't really Caligula at all.
And so we get to my question: Have I seen Caligula once, or twice?
When I started watching, there came a message on screen that almost made me stop watching. As part of a prologue containing about six pages of text with 20 to 40 words on each page, which established the film's troubled and sordid history, there came finally to a page that contained the following:
"This unprecedented edit is composed entirely of previously unseen footage."
What's that you say?
And:
Um, how is that possible?
How indeed.
How could a film exist that would be considered the "same film" as another film, yet use not a second of the footage from that film?
I couldn't believe it, and in fact, I sort of still don't.
How can a director get so much coverage as to be able to make -- not him personally, but someone else nearly 50 years later -- an entire almost three-hour movie that is nothing but outtakes? And have that movie be even slightly coherent?
One of the stories in the sordid history of Caligula is how the film ended up costing twice its budget. But even when a film is guilty of those sorts of excesses -- the same sort that a certain sadistic Roman emperor may have been guilty of -- how could there be zero scenes that two different people interpreting the available footage would both agree should be part of the final cut?
How? How? How?
As I was starting to watch the movie, I began doubting that I'd read the prologue's declaration correctly. Because this Caligula does feel like a complete movie, whereas the one I saw 20 years most decidedly did not. In fact, I remember that movie ending and me not even realizing it was about to end. Maybe I'd sort of stopped paying attention.
So I did continue watching Caligula: The Ultimate Cut, despite knowing that my hopes of unsimulated sex had been dashed. It may be that the curiosity of this entirely new footage spurred me on. How else to explain settling in for a three-hour movie you know to be terrible, without the promise of the single thing most responsible for it being terrible, the hardcore porn edited into it by the founder of Penthouse? (In this scenario I am arguing that the thing that makes it terrible is the only thing that makes it worth watching, which is contrary to your approach to most films.)
There were only two things I definitively remembered about Caligula from my first viewing, in terms of specifics. There were general things I remembered, like the fact that the movie had very few close-ups, and seemed to be filmed primarily at the depth of a person watching a play from about the 30th row. Which made it decidedly uncinematic indeed. But specifics? Only two for certain:
1) There's a scene that's stuck with me, where men are buried in the colosseum dirt up to their necks, and are decapitated by some sort of giant threshing machine as spectators watch;
2) Helen Mirren gets naked.
I thought, if I found that either of these things was in the movie, I would have to know that the opening text was lying to me, or that I had misread it.
Sure enough, both scenes came along. Though I should say, Mirren is naked enough in Caligula that I can't say for sure her nude scenes here are the same scenes as the ones I saw previously.
So let's just focus on the thresher scene.
Indeed, one of the most callous acts by Caligula is to arrest and execute the very man who helped bring him to power. Macro, played by Guido Mannari, strangles the previous emperor, O'Toole's STD-infested Tiberius, when the man is on his death bed but just won't die. Caligula was going to bash his head in but is too much of a coward to do so. (We originally think he's had a crisis of conscience. We later learn that must have been wrong, because Caligula has no conscience.) So Macro does the deed and would justifiably believe he's now going to be in Caligula's good graces forever. Instead, at an opportune moment, Caligula has him arrested, buried to his neck in dirty and run over with a machine that lops his head from his shoulders.
Memorable, right?
And yes I remembered this scene, and yes it played out pretty much like I remembered it playing out.
So am I to believe that there is different footage of the thresher scene that was used instead of the footage I saw in 2006? Isn't one bit of footage of a thresher cutting a man's head off as good as another?
It's almost enough to make me try to track down the vastly inferior version of Caligula I saw previously, though that might be difficult because I think there are like a dozen versions of this movie out there -- probably almost none of which are readily available. (I think I rented it form the library in 2006, though I can't be sure. And that would be a library in Los Angeles anyway.)
So yeah. While I have to take the film's word for it that this is all new footage, I just can't believe that anyone in their right mind would have rejected all this good footage and opted for weaker versions of it. Because the producers of the Ultimate Cut wouldn't have rejected better versions of the footage, merely to be able to see that this version "is composed entirely of previously unseen footage," would they? What they say they wanted, and what they certainly achieved, was to make the best version of Caligula they could, no matter how they had to Frankenstein it.
The whole thing just seems highly implausible.
Even more plausible? I thought Caligula: The Ultimate Cut was pretty good. And certainly very watchable for three hours without me ever getting bored.
What it does that the other version didn't do is it gives a complete arc of this grotesque man, from rise to fall with every step of the way in between. In fact, the footage that they scrounged from over 90 hours of available archival footage only proves just how deliberately this narrative was conceived by director Tinto Brass. Supposedly this also sticks to the script originally written by Gore Vidal, which proves that that, also, was a good script, eager to make a fairly traditional story of the lifecycle of a monster.
The interest by Penthouse was always in the fact that a true version of Caligula's life could only be depicted with (near) extreme sex, and violence that was more implied than extreme. So even in this version that doesn't contain Guccione's superfluous porn scenes, we get a lot of full nudity for both men and women, some simulated sex involving erect penises (though some of those are not real), and orgy scenes that would make the characters in Eyes Wide Shut blush. The movie still titillates on this basic level, even without the unsimulated sex -- though it should be said that most of it just feels sad and gross, which is also the point. Probably the only actual titillation I experienced was seeing Mirren's sex scenes, since she's such an icon and since she was so terribly beautiful back then. (She's still so beautiful, but a younger generation is only familiar with her from age 50 onward. When she was around 30, I feel like she could have played Helen of Troy.)
So yes, I'm glad I did watch all three hours of what seemed like a very different Caligula to me in many respects, but still familiar from the movie I saw 20 years ago.
As to the ultimate question of its categorization -- whether this should go in my lists as an entirely new movie, or a second viewing of a movie I'd already seen -- I think I'll just have to go with this being the same movie. They can tell me the footage is entirely new until they're blue in the face, but that just does not strike me as credible, so I choose not to believe it. Some of it had to be the same.
And since this is effectively an augmented version of a movie I've already seen, I won't accord it a second spot on my viewing list, just as I haven't accorded their own spot the quite different versions I've seen of Cinema Paradiso, Donnie Darko, Blade Runner and others.
The fact that I can't name a lot more examples than those three indicates how much I don't like watching "unofficial" versions of movies, probably for this very reason. I feel like once you've released a movie into the world, that's it. You can't keep tweaking it because you were unhappy with how it was made the first time. The time for doing that was while you were still in the editing room, even if factors outside your control were controlling you.
But I guess I'm glad they did it with Caligula, because the special place this film always held in my mind for its notoriety now gets an additional special place, for its successful portrayal of a man of unsurpassed cruelty and baseness.
