Caligula

Sublimely ridiculous porno-togarama from Tinto Brass. A gob-smacking combination of luvvies, ancient Rome and 'Penthouse' magazine
The counter-culture is forever striving for legitimacy and, ultimately, ubiquity. By the same token, those capitalists operating in the margins, be they the spheres of organised crime or the sex industry, crave bourgeois respectability and cultural credibility - which only generates even more bucketfuls of filthy lucre. So during the 1970s, while punk was shaking The Man's hand over walnut oak boardroom tables, 'old-fashioned' industrialist pornographers (as distinct from Walerian Borowczyk or Paul Morrissey and his transgressive Factory fare) could be found busily penetrating the juicy cavities of mainstream cinema. A year after 'Playboy' founder Hugh Hefner financed Roman Polanski's gorily realised Macbeth (1971), the obscenely successful fellatio flick Deep Throat unexpectedly reared up and smacked the middle-classes between the eyes, soon becoming the equivalent of an extra-spicy amuse bouche at lower Manhattan dinner parties. At any rate, it went down very well with Jacqueline Onassis and Truman Capote. Thus, with the softcore likes of Emmanuelle and The Story Of O in cinemas, it seemed logical, even vaguely admirable from an artistic perspective, that 'Penthouse' emperor Bob Guccione should take a stab at Caligula, a 'porn-epic'. As he loftily told reporters, "X-rated films... are a force that has to be dealt with [and made] part of the establishment. [I want] to bring together two diametrically-opposed aspects of the film industry." Italian sexploitation king Tinto Brass (Salon Kitty) was hired to direct a screenplay by no lesser an authority than Gore Vidal, based on Suetonius's revealing 'The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars'. RSC heavyweights Peter O'Toole, John Gielgud and Helen Mirren were cast as those murderous, sex-mad, pox-ridden Romans, along with droog-of-the-moment Malcolm McDowell in the title role. This would be a truly groundbreaking picture, a (heavy) breathing Aubrey Beardsley illustration, combining high-art, high-drama and Penthouse Pets placing their ankles behind their ears. It all went terribly wrong. With a trio of emperor-sized egos in bed, the Vidal-Brass-Guccione threesome collapsed under the weight of those old artistic differences. "I want to screw theeez Penthouse!" the anarchic Tinto informed McDowell, who envisaged Caligula as less an insane tyrant than an anarchic revolutionary, hastening the Senate's downfall from the top. Vidal was barred from the set; lawsuits pinged between Italy and the States; and the 'Penthouse' boss, tired of being dry-humped by Brass, finished the film off himself, inserting extra hardcore, willy-nilly, into the edit. Said McDowell of his experience, "I just tried to survive it". The result is utterly unique. One's enjoyment (the word used advisedly) may also depend on which version you're exposed to. The theatrical cut is a badly-dubbed, silly old mess, a third-rate Ken Russell. The uncut version, on the other hand, is a fascinating mess, made strange and mad through sheer licentiousness. McDowell, who's on screen for pretty much the whole picture, is, well, very McDowell: whether coquettishly swiveling in his boots like a doe-eyed Biggus Dickus, quipping like Lurkio in Up Pompeii ("I thought you didn't like virgins," he's chided. "I've never known any," comes the reply) or simply shrieking like a bat. Among other outrages, he has sex with his sister (dead or alive); marries "the most promiscuous woman in Rome" (Mirren); sleeps with his horse; turns the senators wives into prostitutes for an imperial brothel ("A logical way to balance the state budget"); and rapes a virgin bride on her wedding day. And then fists the groom. The fistee is later charged with being "an honest man and therefore a bad Roman, and therefore a traitor". His penis is cut off and fed to the hounds while cackling hags hoist up their togas and urinate on his corpse. You can sort of see what they were trying to do. But it doesn't work. Caligula hiccups from one sorry sequence to the next, seemingly without connective tissue; the whole enlivened, if that's the right word, by repetitive and bewilderingly gratuitous money shots. If you want a picture of the future two hours and 36 minutes, imagine a scrotal sac slapping on a human face forever. Wherever you look, men and women, often in jarringly different film stock, are performing every permutation of straight or gay sex, or vigorously masturbating to issue like glassy-eyed clockwork monkeys. The effect is exactly like watching distinguished thespians politely attempting to ignore a stage invasion at the Old Vic by furiously copulating naturists, right in the middle of a pivotal soliloquy. As if embarrassed, O'Toole bails out early, as does Gielgud. At least for the latter it was a warm-up for Prospero's Books. "I had to take my destiny with my own hands," cries Caligula, as everywhere, everyone is taking their own, and other people's, into their hands too. And yet the film - graphic and coy all at once - doesn't work as pornography either. Aside from the interminable zooms, hardcore is generally characterised by static shots, gentle pans and dissolves. Here, an elongated fellatio scene is continually intercut with an extremely camp sequence of soldiers mincing off to war. Elsewhere, some sisters of Sappho have it off for what seems like an eternity, but the jump-cuts and addition of an ethereal chorus with strident orchestration should frustrate even the most determined onanist. During one early tableau, the film - already the cultural equivalent of PT Barnum's Fejee Mermaid - becomes a literal freakshow, featuring a lusty three-eyed woman and a four-handed man. It's about as erotic as a Francis Bacon retrospective. Perhaps the best way to read it is as a bawdy but misfiring comedy: "Is it good for growing hair?" muses McDowell, massaging freshly generated semen into his scalp like Mary Jensen. Mirren even throws the audience a wink during her saucy dance, as if to say, "Don't take any of this seriously". Vidal's defence (pre-Guccione's meddling) was that regardless of whether the events portrayed in the movie were strictly accurate, they were representative of the kind of debauchery the ancient Romans indulged in. (After all, these were the self same people who'd reportedly dug up a frozen dinosaur from northern Europe and cooked and ate it for a feast.) Yet there's probably more historical veracity in Monty Python's Life Of Brian. Roman traitors were almost certainly not buried up to their necks and decapitated by a gigantic moving wall with swirling lawnmower blades, however impressive it looks. Because visually, Caligula is undeniably fabulous: Derek Jarman meets Peter Greenaway and Federico Fellini - the alternative name for the film could well be '8?? Inches'. This may be a bad trip of a movie, dipped in the headache inducing 'deep reds' of Brass's fellow countryman Dario Argento, but here too are Danilo Donati's gorgeously grandiose sets; here are exquisite, hand-crafted larger-than-life sculptures modeled on real Roman artifacts; and everywhere, superbly strange details, rendered almost subliminal, such as a white rat pulling a tiny golden chariot. Except we never get to see any of it properly. At one point, amid all the bump 'n' grind, a man on stilts clops into shot. As he slowly pegs it from one end of the sound stage to the other, you can't help wondering if he's muttering under his breath in Italian, "Yeah, yeah, whatever. What I do takes skill, you know?"
Verdict A corny porny orgy of excess.