‘An irresistible mix of art and genitals’: Is the X-rated 1970s movie Caligula a lost masterpiece?

The Roman epic was one of the all-time fiascos, despite a stellar cast that included Malcolm McDowell and Helen Mirren. James Mottram talks to the ‘Clockwork Orange’ star and the producer who has tried to restore its reputation

Malcolm McDowell and Helen Mirren in ‘Caligula' (Penthouse Films International LLC)

When Malcolm McDowell first heard that a new cut of Caligula was being worked on, he simply rolled his eyes. “That’s what I did,” he says. “Because I never, ever wanted to talk about that damn film ever again.” The actor famed for roles in If… and A Clockwork Orange had high hopes when he originally signed up for Caligula, a portrait of the Roman Emperor scripted by esteemed writer Gore Vidal, directed by the Italian filmmaker Tinto Brass and co-starring Helen Mirren, Peter O’Toole and Sir John Gielgud.

While Brass and Vidal didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye, the real problem came with the film’s financier, Bob Guccione, the founder of the erotic magazine Penthouse. McDowell had raised concerns even before the film was made, only to be told by a hopeful Vidal: “Think of him as one of the Warner Brothers.” But Guccione fell out with the director, firing Brass.

Worse was to come. After the film wrapped, Guccione covertly shot pornographic scenes with some Penthouse girls, and spliced the material into the film. When McDowell saw the final version, released in 1980 almost four years after shooting had concluded, he felt betrayed. “I advise people never to see it. It is a terrible film: exploitive and pornographic.” Mirren, who plays Caesonia, Caligula’s wife, took it in good humour, calling the film “an irresistible mix of art and genitals”. But critics were appalled. “A trough of rotten swill,” wrote The New York Observer’s Rex Reed, while fellow reviewer Roger Ebert called it “sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash”. McDowell was left shell-shocked. “I was really very depressed about it. Actually. I think I went into a depression. It affected me badly. Honestly, I think it was one of the reasons I left England.” The actor made a new home in Los Angeles.

I ask McDowell if he ever spoke to his good friends and collaborators, the directors Stanley Kubrick or Lindsay Anderson, about it. “I don’t think they cared! I mean, it’s like, you make your bed, you got to lie in it, you know? I mean, look, it’s just one of those awful things. That was an anomaly. Because normally, you have a production company that’s got a certain track record, you have a studio behind you... they are really very interested to see the film go as according to the script. Not this megalomaniac. Basically, at one point I said to him, ‘Bob, why didn’t you play the part yourself?’”

Guccione did, at least, have the sense to hire Danilo Donati, the visionary Italian production designer who went on to create the outlandish sets for Mike Hodges’ Flash Gordon. Similarly, Donati’s work for Caligula astounds, from the lavish sets to the costumes, jewellery and even wigs. As Guccione once said in an interview with Penthouse, “Danilo Donati is the real star of Caligula… next to him, Brass is a crude and uncomprehending lout.”

While McDowell advised his agents never to forward any requests connected to Caligula to him, things changed when Thomas Negovan, an art gallery owner and short filmmaker, was hired by the management company that took over the Penthouse brand. “Many people over the years had told them that the archives surrounding Caligula were notable,” says Negovan. “And they basically asked me to assess that statement.”

Brought onto the project in 2019, Negovan had never even seen the sexed-up Caligula. “I was never a Caligula fan, I was a Malcolm McDowell fan,” he says. The producer soon became familiar with the original movie, however. “It’s a train wreck, by any measure. I understand now the charm of that. Everyone likes to watch a car crash. So there is that huge budget, terrible movie spectacle idea around this that does have a charm, and I do understand that. But the problem is that people like Malcolm McDowell have been the butt of that joke for 50 years.”

Malcolm McDowell and Helen Mirren in ‘Caligula' (Penthouse Films International LLC)

What Negovan discovered in a Los Angeles storage facility was dusty cans filled with original camera negatives and audio material. All of it was unused, previously unseen or heard. “No one had had cause to go through all these boxes in decades,” he says. “So they knew it was there. They just hadn’t ever opened them.” It was enough to begin a painstaking process of reconstructing the film to something akin to Vidal and Brass’s original vision.

Now running at almost three hours, Caligula: The Ultimate Cut is a vastly different animal to its lurid predecessor. While there is still some eroticism to certain scenes – erect penises still abound – the grubby sexploitation feel has been freely excised. “It wasn’t supposed to be a porn movie,” says Negovan. “You think Helen Mirren and John Gielgud took a job in a porn movie with no plot? No, that’s the point. Like it had a script. It had incredible sets, incredible costumes. And people really sweated to make this film.”

Negovan sweated too, initially drawing a blank when he tried to contact McDowell, Brass and Mirren. He only got to McDowell by connecting over Instagram with Mark Critch, the creator of the TV show Son of a Critch, which stars the actor. It was Critch who advised McDowell to watch the recut. “I was in bed, in Newfoundland, in St John’s, the furthest rock on the east coast of the Americas,” recalls McDowell. “And I was amazed – it all came flooding back. And I was sort of vaguely stunned. I sat there in silence for quite a while thinking about what I’ve seen.”

It took McDowell back to his original intentions for playing Caligula, who was famed for burning through the treasury collated by his predecessor Tiberius (played in the film by O’Toole). “I mean, he was very popular because he was always giving gold sovereigns away for the populace. I think people really loved him though. He was quite a character. And he was sort of like an original. The way I decided to do it was play him as an anarchist but destroying the Roman Empire from the top.”

Negovan went back to Vidal’s original script as his starting point. “What I did in my head and in my heart was created like the Venn diagram: here’s Malcolm’s circle, here’s Gore’s, here’s Tinto’s and here’s Bob’s. Bob, hiring people like Danilo Donati to make those incredible sets was in complete opposition to Gore’s vision. But when you look at what everyone wanted, there is a space, there is a flag that’s in the middle of that circle, which is a sense of realism and historical accuracy.”

Malcolm the most of it: McDowell in ‘Caligula’ (Penthouse Films International LLC)

With so much new footage, Caligula: The Ultimate Cut certainly rescues the film’s reputation from the trashy doldrums. Helen Mirren’s role for example is greatly expanded, from 17 minutes’ worth of material in the Guccione cut to almost an hour here. “The last 45 minutes of the film is all new,” adds McDowell. “Or never been seen before. I guess Guccione just got bored with it and said, ‘Let’s just wrap it here and just have him killed and that’s it. Put it out.’”

For those that might be concerned the film has been sanitised, you can rest easy. The scene where a jealous Caligula rapes the virginal Livia and her bridegroom, the officer Proculus, at their wedding, remains intact. When Critch suggested to McDowell that they screen the film for a children’s charity event in St John’s, under the belief the film’s porn elements had been removed, he was shocked. “I said, ‘Yeah. But that’s not porn!’ That is who Caligula was,” recalls McDowell, gleefully. “Ultimate power corrupts absolutely. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Still, McDowell is delighted by this new cut, that a lost performance he gave half a century ago has been resurrected. “[I’m] thrilled that the real film is there now for everyone to see.” His only sadness surrounds Brass, who is now 91. “He is still alive, but he has got some kind of dementia, I believe. And so he will never really know [about this new cut]. I think he’d be very happy with his movie because all the major sequences are in it. And they are really beautiful.” No longer is Caligula the butt of anyone’s joke. As McDowell says: “Even 50 years later, almost, there’s nothing like it.”

‘Caligula: The Ultimate Cut’ is in cinemas from 9 August