“Shocked! Shocked!”
I have finally got around to seeing Bob Guccione’s Caligula. I was aware of it when it came out but never had any desire to catch it then. It was just above my age range and I was put off by the fact that it had been cut to ribbons by the censors anyway. I wanted to see a whole film, not a film full of holes. Reviewers had complained the plot made no sense and the performances were poor. Small wonder, as this would be the inevitable effect of the blue-noses’ chopping and hacking.
An unexpurgated edition appeared in the United States, of course. When that came out, commentators of the day reported that it was hard-core porn, fit only for the grindhouse cinemas of Times Square. I remember the distinguished British actors of the day who had been in it, all declaring that they had had no knowledge that Guccione and his co-director Tinto Brass were going to splice in pornographic scenes later when they’d gone home. They were “Shocked! Shocked!” to discover this had been done.
The version I have now is, so far as I can tell, the original, full-length, uncensored US copy. A number of things are now clear from this. First and foremost, those who tried to pull a fig-leaf over their embarrassment and pretend they had had no idea there was any live sex going on on set were lying through their teeth. Doubtless there were several different takes of some scenes so as to produce bowdlerized versions of them that might please censors abroad but in the US edition, there they all are! Peter O’Toole, Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, swanning around in front of copulating couples (and more than couples). No cut-aways, no inserted clips. The big stars are right there, in the self-same frame as the erect cocks and the penetrated arses. They cannot not have known.
The other thing that interested me was that there were some Big British Stars in it who never appeared at all. A good many cast members were Italian actors who spoke no English. I spotted the voices of John Shrapnel, Joss Ackland and Patrick Allen dubbing for them, all uncredited.
I still feel, as I thought long ago, that there was fairly little point in it given that it could hardly hope to surpass the BBC’s I, Claudius and it doesn’t, of course. That is not to say that the performances, now that we can see them in full, are not impressive. McDowell is remarkably powerful as Caligula. It really is one of his best efforts. O’Toole is in top form as Tiberius, and we should remember this was the same time as his notorious Macbeth that dominated the British newspapers that silly season for its sheer awfulness. He acquits himself very well indeed here.
There are the odd few anachronisms but by and large it is historically accurate. Is the sex a distraction? Is it gratuitous? There is one lesbian scene that is quite obviously wedged in for titillation purposes only and has nothing to do with the plot but the rest is pretty well justified.
The opening title card before the film even begins spells out the bill of fare but it’s not about the sex, it’s about the religion. ‘PAGAN ROME’. Indeed. That’s what you’re going to see. Yet it’s not exactly doing a great job proselytising for the religion, though, is it? Not much of an advertisement, if that what it’s meant to be. Aversion therapy, more like. It shows just what the cutting edge of Roman paganism was all about. Witness a cruel, narcissistic and decadent ruling elite making poor people into their property, treating them as sex-objects, and, indeed, just as objects, killing them when they grow bored with them, or for a whim, or for entertainment, all the while living in terror of their crazed dictator whom they must worship as their god. You New-Age kids up for that, eh? Yearning for your Pagan dawn, yes? Well, this was it. How long do you think you’d have survived in Caligula’s Roma? Here’s a clue. Not long.
I wonder that Guccione had not the least intention of so doing, but can’t help thinking that, in spite of himself, he created a more powerful piece of pro-Christian propaganda than The Last Temptation of Christ, which was intended by Scorsese to be just that but which earned him the wrath of the Pope nevertheless.
Strangely, although I say this in a joking manner, my jest may not be too far wide of the mark. Straight after this title card, Guccione places a direct Biblical quotation - from Christ Himself - smack in front of his audience: Mark 8:36. There’s something going on here, for sure. It’s more than coincidence. Of course, I am well aware that Guccione would have many angles in mind but the one I think that is the most insistent is not the religious, nor the sexual but the political.
Given when this film was made, it really shouldn’t be too hard for us now to read Caligula as an analogy for Richard Nixon. Nor need we struggle to equate Caligula’s atrocities with those of Nixon’s Vietnam War. We can easily connect the imbecilic Claudius with Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford. This is a film about its own era, in which Rome becomes a metaphor for the United States. The choice of screenwriter does kind of give the game away a bit. I mean to say, Gore Vidal! A brilliant satirist, classical scholar and American political historian who hated Richard Nixon... This is precisely the sort of connection he would most have delighted in making.
As an aside here, I wonder if the doubts that are raised by the senators as to whether Caligula really conquered Britain (we, the audience, see clearly that he didn’t even leave Rome) might not be an early manifestation of the popular American belief that the Moon landings - Nixon’s great triumph - were not real?
Thus, although it is not as great a film as Apocalypse Now, if I’m right here then it does belong in the same bracket, as a film that uses a historical or literary allusion to talk about Vietnam. In the case of Apocalypse Now, that was Joseph Conrad, in this case Gore Vidal (although drawing heavily on Robert Graves, of course). Perhaps it is closer to M*A*S*H* in that it is ostensibly about something else but is really about Vietnam. It is, nonetheless, much under-rated I would say and if it is a political allegory, and I think it is, then there is an extra string to its bow.
In a weird twist of history, the choice of title music, the masked ball from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, puts us today in mind of the TV show The Apprentice. Caligula could now serve quite nicely as an allegory for the Donald Trump years.