Bob guccione caligula film

Early in the production, Guccione hired Gore Vidal, a prolific novelist & screenwriter, whose first pass at the script received the note to have fewer gay sex scenes. But who’s watching this gaudy monstrosity for nuance?

The plot of “The Ultimate Cut” is not materially different than the original version: Young Caligula (McDowell) succeeds his great-uncle Tiberius (O’Toole) as Emperor (and a perpetual vibe-ruiner) and proceeds to make an absolute mess of Rome by plundering its resources as his personal playground.

But somewhere amidst all of the in-fighting and controversy, much less this cut of the film attempting to honor basically everybody but him, was it ever possible to create a version of this film that satisfied each person’s vision, delivering polished, believable performances, Fellini-esque spectacle and a bit of good old-fashioned smut all at once?

Their decisions lengthen scenes rather than add meaningful information or depth, and tone down their bawdy, ostentatious spectacle to the detriment of the film’s flow and momentum.

His reign was short, as was his popularity, but by the time he was murdered at the age of twenty-nine, he had already been around too long.

Malcolm McDowell – who seems to have made a career from playing nutters – stars in the title role, and bounds through the incest, homosexuality, buggery, necrophilia and rape as though they were cocktail sports in Brighton.

As the film begins, Caligula is summoned to Capri by his adoptive grandfather, Emperor Tiberius (Peter O’Toole, toothless and covered in sores), where he watches a group of youths and maidens acting out the old man’s fantasies – after casually disembowelling a drunken soldier.

“Little Boots” (thats’ what Tiberius calls Caligula) repays grandad for his kindness by letting his pal Macro (Guido Mannari), commander of the Pretorian Guard, smother him.

Don’t worry – Macro is soon for the chop himself.

Safely installed as Consul, Caligula has an affair with his sister, Drusilla (Teresa Ann Savoy) and dresses up as a woman to cast an eye over the likely candidates for a wife among the priestesses in the Temple of Isis – the winner is Caesonia (played by gorgeous Helen Mirren, who spends more time out of her kecks than in them).

Already crazier than three drunken billy goats, Caligula’s power and paranoia increase, resulting in a lengthy smorgasbord of explicit sex mixed with assorted horrors such as disembowelment, castration, decapitation (there’s even a giant lawn mower that chops heads off) and strangulation.

Hands are shoved into fires.

Conversely, there were additional scenes in the original cut featuring a young soldier named Proculus (Donato Placido), but the Ultimate Cut disregards him after Caligula savagely enacts his own version of Prima Nocta on the Praetorian’s wedding day.

Devoting a substantial portion of his adult life to “Caligula” after first becoming obsessed with it during the original 1980 theatrical release, writer, musician and art historian Thomas Negovan dedicated three years to meticulously re-editing the film using those original materials with the intent of uncovering a lost masterpiece equal to the pedigree of its talent in front of the camera and behind.

More a heroic act of preservation than artistic vindication, “The Ultimate Cut” highlights what does work practically in the film (the production design and performances), as well as the foundational issues that were likely irreparable from its conception. Playing a mercurial emperor who maintains an incestuous obsession with his sister and has people murdered like it’s a bodily function, McDowell doesn’t exactly earn the audience’s sympathy, but the actor charts the young man’s path from ambitious successor to maniacal despot with much greater clarity and believability than ever before.

As such, “Caligula: The Ultimate Cut” is as a work of revisionism, a project to be admired, but in terms of truly breathing new life into a maligned production, the result is still a bit flaccid.