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Caligula (1979)
Directed by: Bob Guccione, Tinto Brass
Written by: Bob Guccione, Giancarlo Lui, Gore Vidal
Starring: Guido Mannari, Malcolm McDowell, Peter O' Toole, Teresa Ann Savoy
Directed by: Bob Guccione, Tinto Brass
Written by: Bob Guccione, Giancarlo Lui, Gore Vidal
Starring: Guido Mannari, Malcolm McDowell, Peter O' Toole, Teresa Ann Savoy
Caligula (1979) Full Cast & Crew. Directed by (1) Writing credits (8) Cast (61) Produced by (4) Music by (2) Cinematography by (1) Film Editing by (4) Casting By (2) Art Direction by (1) Costume Design by (1) Makeup Department (66) Production Management (12) Second Unit Director or Assistant Director (11) Art Department (124). And Vidal, there were problems with casting, too aggressive a shooting schedule. Caligula: Three Disk Imperial Edition contains several versions of the film. Disc one contains the 1980 uncut, unrated, 156-minute version, along with. Disc two contains a 1979 pre-release version that is more true to Tinto Brass's vision.
HCF GUILTY PLEASURES: CALIGULA [1979]
AVAILABLE ON DVD AND BLU-RAY
RUNNING TIME: 156 min/ 150 min/ 149 min/ 145 min/ 133 min/ 123 min/ 102 min/ 90 min/ 86 min, probably some other running times
![Caligula 1979 The Imperial Edition Uncut Casting Caligula 1979 The Imperial Edition Uncut Casting](http://softcore-index.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Caligula-1979-Uncut-Imperial-Edition_20181214_235548.662-500x282.jpg)
REVIEWED BY: Dr Lenera, Official HCF Critic
Caligula, the young heir to the throne of the syphilis-ridden, half-mad Emperor Tiberius, thinks he has received a bad omen after a blackbird flies into his room early one morning. Shortly afterward, Macro, the head of the Praetorian Guard, appears to tell Caligula that Tiberius, his great uncle, demands that he report at once to the island of Capri, where the Emperor has been residing for a number of years. There, Caligula, who himself is sexually involved with his own sister, finds that Tiberius has become depraved and showing signs of advanced venereal diseases. Tiberius jokingly tries to poison Caligula and one of Tiberius’ friends commits suicide on the prospect of Caligula’s rule. Caligula is saved from killing the dying Tiberius by Macro, who commits the deed himself, choking Tiberius and now ensuring that Caligula becomes Emperor….
How times change. When Caligula first hit UK cinemas in 1979, it had 11 min cut from it, was widely denounced as garbage, and was even more hacked down for video releases where it very hard to see unless you were savvy enough to read advertisements in the back of certain film magazines advertising rare and uncut movies for sale [I plead guilty]. In 2007, the film received a fabulous four disc DVD set full of special features and three versions of the film including the full uncut version, which contained some hardcore porn shots. I couldn’t believe that you could actually go into HMV and pick this up, but there it was, with all the ‘normal’ films. It’s right though that Caligula was eventually treated so well on DVD, because whatever you think of it, it is an extraordinary, one-of-a-kind film that is hard to believe actually got made. It’s part historical drama and part sex and violence exploitation, and a film featuring pornographic footage that stars major stars, which unbelievably include Peter O’ Toole and John Gielgud. It’s considered by many to be one of the worst films ever made. In whichever cut you watch, and there are more cuts of this film than few others, it’s a mess, and viewing it is sometimes close to the experience of slowing down on a road to watch a car crash – you’re aghast but fascinated at the same time – but it has some praise-worthy things in it, contains traces of a truly fine film, and is just so totally insane you have to kind of admire it if you appreciate films that are off the beaten track.
The project had its origins in a TV series which was to be written and directed by Roberto Rossellini. He died, but Roberto’s nephew decided to turn it into a film, and hired the playwright Gore Vidal to write the script. Only Penthouse founder and publisher Bob Guccione was willing to finance the project. Directors John Huston and Lina Wertmuller turned it down and Tinto Brass came on board, along with a strong cast. Shooting for what became a hugely troubled production began in 1976. Vidal insulted Brass in an interview and was sacked, Brass rewrote much of the script, star Maria Schneider resigned because of the nudity, the budget was too low for such an ambitious film causing set designer Danilo Donati to re-do most of his sets and even causing script changes, and Brass and Guccione kept falling out, mainly due to Guccione wanting more and more sex in the film. After endless delays the film seemed finished, but then Guccione fired Brass for going way over the budget and extensively re-edited the film and replaced some of Brass’s footage with newly shot hardcore porn, supposedly unknown to most of the stars. The release was further delayed by Brass and Vidal launching lawsuits against Guccione. Vidal and John Gielgud got their names taken off the film and few others involved wanted anything to do with it. Amazingly, or perhaps not, it was a success in many countries despite usually being cut and sometimes even banned. During the time span of its post-production difficulties, Rossellini produced a second film titled Messalina, Messalina with the same sets and costumes, and soon after Joe D’ Amato brought out Caligula 2: The Untold Story, which similarly contained hardcore porn.
I could spend ages detailing the different versions of Caligula, and will only mention the main ones. The original UK cinema release lost 11 min of hardcore sex and violence but had 4 min of alternate footage put back in, running 149 min. The most widely distributed US version ran 102 min, removing many dramatic scenes too, though I once saw a UK video on a shelf running as short as 90 min! In 1984 Rosselini released his own 133 min cut in Italy which itself was re-edited at least twice. In 1999 Channel 4 showed a 145 min version [ partly shorter due to PAL speed-up] which contained some alternate footage and some creative panning and scanning. Then in 2007 for the DVD set which also released the original 1979 cut with hardcore, a new 153 min cut was created which not only, as per some other versions, replaced most of the hardcore footage with alternate shots and even some 16 mm shots they found, but re-arranged some scenes in keeping with Brass’s original vision for the film. Recently, Brass has announced that he is going to work on a genuine ‘director’s cut’ of Caligula. I’m not a fan of Brass, whether as an avant garde filmmaker or as a soft pornographer: he seems to me to be a very minor filmmaker with occasional artistic aspirations way beyond his talent, but his cut of Caligula [and it’s probably his best film] should be the definitive version. I wonder if it will include some of the material not included in any version that exists?
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Though truth be told there’s only 6 min of it in a 156 min film, how much one likes the uncut 156 min version probably depends on ones feelings towards hardcore porn. I personally don’t find it offensive to watch, but don’t find it particularly enjoyable either. The many hardcore insertions during the several orgy scenes and a lengthy lesbian sequence are just not necessary to the film in my opinion, and Brass’s orgy footage is actually much more interesting than Guccioni’s because, while it’s not as explicit, it suggests much more deviancy including even some animals being led around. For me therefore the 153 cut is the best version, and also because the re-arranging of some footage removes some continuity errors and poor edits between scenes, though the film is still a bit of a shambles. There are still a few hardcore shots in this version, and watching it proves that, out of the cast, certainly O’ Toole and McDowell must have had some idea of what they were making, because in some shots you can clearly see ‘stuff’ going on near and behind them, in particular a certain bit where some men ‘provide’ a very unique kind of beauty treatment for a woman.
Caligula shows you what it’s ‘all’ about in the first half hour, after which it’s not really worth any viewer who is hating the film to continue. It begins with showing him romping with his sister Drusilla, then takes him to Capri where, during an orgy [actually people seem to be constantly having sex all over the place in this movie], Tiberius decides to punish a soldier for drinking by having rope tied round his penis to close his urinary tract, gallons of wine poured down his throat, and his bursting stomach punctured with a sword so both blood and winde pours out. Then we get a totally bizarre scene set in and around a swimming pool where naked women [and a few men] are sitting around. Tiberius, who is riddled with syphilis and therefore looks horrid, cries out: “Come in my little fishes, all of you”, and they dive in while Caligula does a strange march/dance that includes pretending to shoot with a bow and arrow. Then a guy called Nerva [and at least Gielgud wasn’t in the film for long, while O’ Toole soon follows him], is found dying in his pool, having slit his throat, and Caligula tries to get him to tell him what it’s like to die. You have it all in these first scenes: sex, sexual perversion, extreme and possibly gratuitous violence, weird camp, and moments of real resonance with strong acting. It’s these things that make up Caligula, and it certainly is an odd mix, resulting in a work that is terribly uneven, but also in one that is hardly ever dull despite its considerable running time and it being a sword and sandal epic that doesn’t feature much action.
Once Caligula becomes emperor, the film seems to be attempting to show us how power corrupts, though of course Caligula isn’t shown to be ‘quite right’ even at the beginning. There not being a whole lot of tension in the film, something not helped by a few scenes going on for far longer than they need to like an endless death scene where Caligula does far more than just mourn the person, the main fascinations are what insane thing is Caligula going to do next and what shocking image is the film going to throw at us. Caligula makes his soldiers invade Britain naked. He interrupts a wedding to rape the bride on the kitchen table and then out his hand up the groom’s bottom. A combine harvester-type device chops off the heads of people buried in the sand of an arena. Two lesbians wipe the blood of a dead man onto themselves and urinate on him, after which his penis is cut off and fed to two dogs. And so it goes on. The main idea was to obviously show the Romans, at least the rich kind [though there is an interesting scene where Caligula, in disguise, visits a poor area of the city], as they really were, and records do indicate they were often really like this, though the film weakens its aspirations to authenticity a bit by messing around with the facts of its story. There’s no doubt though that Caligula was as cruel, perverted [in fact probably even more – the film just shows him sharing a bed with his horse] and insane as the film depicts him.
Authenticity certainly doesn’t seem to have been aimed for by the sets either, but they’re oddly effective anyway, the obvious attempts to get around the budget like blacked-out areas, silk backdrops and scenic backings giving parts of the film an almost dreamlike feel. Some sets, especially an early cave-like room with lots of other rooms where an orgy is taking place, are really quite interesting and often well lit by cinematographer Silvano Ippoliti, who uses red a lot throughout and to good effect. Every now and again you get a really well done scene, usually a dramatic scene with strong writing and acting, but there’s also a great lesbian pool scene which is perhaps the only sexual scene which actually tries to be erotic. The setting, the camerawork, the music, and yes, the pretty girls, all come together to create a heady yet relaxing sequence with an extremely sexy mood. The film’s score is credited to a Paul Clemente, but is actually the work of Ennio Morricone’s ex-producer Bruno Nicolai. Some of the music just doesn’t seem to go with the on-screen action at all, while familiar classical pieces by Prokofiev and Khachaturian are also a bit jarring.
Malcolm McDowell, seemingly building on certain previous roles like his superb turn in A Clockwork Orange, gives an extremely full-throttle, no-holds-barred performance. This Caligula is horrible, but he’s also very charismatic and you just can’t take your eyes off him when he’s on-screen. Nor can you think of any other actor of the time playing the part so well. O’ Toole just comes across as hammy and Helen Mirren looks lost, but she does get a brief lesbian scene. Caligula is a degenerate, muddled piece of trash, but it’s also quite remarkable in its bonkers way, has bits and pieces of mad genius in there, and is really pretty compelling if you can get past all the sex and violence, which a lot of people can’t. I’m not saying that it should be considered a really good film, and even after several viewings I feel like washing afterwards each time, but it has definite plusses which for me outweigh the minuses, I’m glad it exists, and I sometimes find myself drawn back to the decadence of Ancient Rome as shown by the film so I can again ask myself things like: “What were they thinking? How did this get made?”, and feel a little sad that you’re not likely to see something like this on our cinema screens today.
Rating:
It wasn't just the pubic hair on display that got Vilgot Sjoman's political screed-cum-melodrama seized at customs when it was brought here in 1969, put at the center of an obscenity case tried by the Supreme Court and considered one of the more notorious films of its day. (Although the few scenes in which actors Lena Nyman and Borje Ahlstedt show off some hairy nether regions certainly helped distinguished this Swedish import from the usual foreign-film fare.) No, what put this story of a radical student having an affair with a married man in boiling hot water was the sequence in which Nyman plants a kiss on her costar's penis in full view; that was enough to brew up a shitstorm that woud end up breaking down censorship barriers and ultimately help usher in an age of cinematic permissiveness. No one talked about the interview footage of Martin Luther King Jr., or footage of actual Vietnam War protesting, or the cheeky subversiveness of the movie's antiauthoritarian humor. They focused on the genital smooch. The curiosity and the contrversy helped garner it a broader audience.
And the rest is history. Cinematographer-turned-director Haskell Wexler's mix of narrative and nonfiction (including actual riot footage shot during the '68 Democratic Convention in Chicago) is fueled by the tension of watching performers interact with real situations. One scene in particular, however, struck the MPAA board as a little too real for their tastes: A naked-as-jaybirds romp between future Tarantino favorite Robert Forster and Marianna Hill, with the two of them ending up literally between the sheets. The almost documentary-like feel of their tryst earned Wexler's movie an X, though he'd claim that the rating was more reflective of the political rage he portrayed onscreen.
We still think the you-are-there canoodling in the buff may have had something do with it, Haskell. It may not have been as momentous as Stravinsky's The Rites of Spring (as Pauline Kael notoriously claimed at the time), but Bernardo Bertolucci's seminal film was a watershed how sex was depicted on film. The Italian director originally wanted French stars Dominique Sanda and Jean-Louis Trintignant to play the leads; Sanda had just gotten pregnant, however, and Trintignant wouldn't do nudity. So the director enlisted newcomer Maria Schneider and, in a casting coup, Marlon Brando — with the latter quickly turning this tale into a riveting, expansive meditation on his own screen image. His character is a widower who's been beaten down by life, and who uses his anonymous, athletic and often creative sexual encounters in an empty Parisian apartment as his way of escaping from the world. Audiences weren't used to seeing a major movie star having fingers shoved into his rectum, and though its sex scenes seem somewhat tame today, the film's exploration of how carnality can destroy boundaries is still something to behold.
And you'll never hear the phrase 'go get the butter' the same way again. Nestled inside Nicolas Roeg's blood-chilling paranormal thriller is one of the best sex scenes ever committed to film. Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie play a couple relocated to Venice after the accidental death of their daughter. Before becoming unraveled by an English psychic claiming spectral visions of their child, the two stars disrobe for a night of marital bliss. The details are one thing (a pocket of saliva gleaming on Christie's neck, an exchange of grins accompanying a change of positions), but it's Roeg's intercutting between the act and its after-moments that makes the sequence so sublime. What makes the film near-pornographic, you ask?
Sutherland later claimed that he and Christie actually made love on camera during the sequence — a statement that's been refuted and resubstantiated many times over the years, but which still lends the scenes an odd voyeuristic thrill. Porn, as we all know, played in seedy theaters full of dudes in dirty raincoats (prior to the video revolution, at least).
Porn did not play at the New York Film Festival — so the fact that the presitigious event would program Nagisa Oshima's look at a real-life murder case involving a maid, her employer and their all-consuming sexual frenzy meant it was not porn, right? Despite the NYFF's seal of approval and the fact that one of Japan's greatest filmmakers had made this very explicit docudrama, the film's sequences of actors very much engaging in coitus noninterruptus were still too 'hot' for customs officials, and the festival's later screenings were stopped. Legal battles would eventually see the courts ruling on the side of Senses being art and not smut, and the movie is now rightfully recognized as a true-crime classic.
Slim thug i run acapella mp3 youtube. But if there was ever a film that challenged the notion of art versus porn, it was this one. The only feature from Bob Guccione's Penthouse Films International watches as the eponymous emperor (played by Malcolm McDowell) leads Rome with both an indiscriminate sword and promiscuous cock. It's an attempt to combine the 'best' of both tony ancient-historical epics (Gore Vidal wrote the script) and skinflick set pieces, but guess which side wins out? Caligula carousels through incest, rape and necrophilia, pausing only to let its heavyweight cast — McDowell, Helen Mirren, Sir John Gielgud, Peter O'Toole — chat with Penthouse Pets novel or find novel uses for piss and spunk. Hedging his bets, Guccione grafted six minutes of hardcore sex onto the film, mostly via an orally fixated orgy sequence; the result feels like the sort of unholy union that might even give the degenerate Roman figurehead pause.
Trying to track down a serial killer who is picking up men in S&M clubs, detective Al Pacino goes undercover into the gay subculture of New York and, as one does when they submerge themselves in their part, gets in way too deep. Director William Friedkin reportedly went in a little too deep as well, and was forced to cut about 40 minutes of footage (!) before the MPAA would change its original X rating to an R —which still didn't stop him from including lots of man-on-man action and intimations of someone being fisted.
The film provoked protests from the gay community for its questionable depiction of homosexuality and the city's leather-daddy scene; the notoriety contributed to Cruising flopping spectacularly upon release. Since then, however, its reputation has been somewhat redeemed, and it has become something of a time capsule for a certain late '70s New York downtown subculture. Rainer Werner Fassbinder's final film is at once one of his most personal, and one of his most reviled, with even his biggest admirers bristling at its garish artificiality and Tom-of-Finland-inspired set design. (Bring on the giant-penis architecture!) But this stagebound, stylized take on Jean Genet's novel is also profoundly intimate and sad, its intense scenes of homosexual sex jutting up against its arch performances and otherworldly atmosphere. It's less an adaptation of a book than a fever dream Fassbinder had after reading it, complete with nocturnal emissions.
Filthy in the best possible sense, David Cronenberg's adaptation of J.G Ballard's near-future novel of vehicular desire surveys the wreckage of modernity and digs up taboos — car-accident fetishes? Inter-wound penetration? — that most of us didn't even know existed. From high-speed, high-impact orgasms to exploring the erotic potential of leg braces, the sex scenes here manage to be both icky and disconcertingly arousing.
Consummately seedy leading man James Spader is a bourgeois professional permanently perverted by a near-death experience, while character actor Elias Koteas turns in one of the randiest performances in film history as a slithering scarfaced greasemonkey. It won a prize for 'audacity' at Cannes; Ted Turner found the movie so degenerate that he tried to have it banned from ever being released. Lars von Trier has been thumbing his nose at society and good taste for long before and, and his only Dogme 95 film helped garner him his first true taste of controversy. It's a bleak black comedy about a group of adults who act like developmentally disabled people in order to both liberate themselves from, and get up in the face of, bourgeois complacency.
One of their provocations involves having group sex – which, naturally, the director shows in characteristically unflinching fashion. (There's also a shot of an erect penis, which was digitally blurred upon the film's release in the U.S.) The film got into ratings trouble in some countries as a result – but by later Von Trier standards, it practically feels like a Disney film.
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