Produced by a pornographer, written by a major American novelist, directed by an Italian auteur, and cast with stars from the English stage, Caligula was impossible to ignore when it was released in 1979.  Critics trashed it, audiences flocked to it, and the press was filled with stories about the pornographer re-editing the movie to include more pornography.  Caligula became a legendary disaster—Variety called it a “moral holocaust”—and the one time I attempted to see it, in high school, I turned it off after five minutes because it was weird to see Malcolm McDowell in softcore.

Almost fifty years after its release, producer Thomas Negovan has sorted through the ninety-six hours of footage and assembled the Ultimate Cut, which does not include a single take from the theatrical version.  The result is a solid palace intrigue drama that is, even without hardcore pornography, a celebration of indulgence—not only the indulgence of its characters but of time (it runs almost three hours), of money (it cost a fortune), of spectacle (it looks incredible).  The film is bursting with lush and sensational images, such as a pair of wedding cakes shaped like an erect penis and a (detailed) vagina.  The department heads (cinematographer Silvano Ippoliti, set and costume designer Danilo Donati, special effects by Franco Celli and Marcello Coccia) are uniformly strong.

The premise of the movie is that Caligula (McDowell) hates being Caesar, holds the entire system in contempt, and spends most of the runtime provoking the senate.  Just a sample: he rapes both a general’s wife and the general on the night of their wedding; he opens an imperial brothel and staffs it with senators’ wives; he makes the senate declare him a god and then baa like sheep after they acquiesce.  McDowell is superb, of course.  He can stab a man like he’s signing a document.  In the movie’s best sequence, Caligula, before he becomes emperor, meets with Tiberius (Peter O’Toole), a dying monarch.  Tiberius exercises his last gasp of power, making Caligula dance for him and then looking away when he does.  He shows off his possessions, including a child who is both boy and girl, which cost him a fortune.  He claims he only became Caesar to avoid getting killed.  In this family, a brother kills a brother who killed his father who killed his son.  It is a grim portrait of the period.

The new release by Unobstructed View is an excellent restoration, and the movie looks gorgeous, with the film grain visible.  The Blu-ray includes a theatrical version, too, though it should be noted that this is a censored cut from a Boston distributer and does not include the hardcore scenes that made the original Caligula notorious.  A quick scan of this version reveals that it contains most of the same scenes but with a different emphasis.  The tone is more moralistic, with the title card describing the setting as “Pagan Rome” and the epigraph from The Gospel of Mark (“What shall it profit a man, if he should gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”).  The Blu-ray also includes two commentaries with Thomas Negovan and a featurette, “The Guccione Scandal,“ which provides a side-by-side comparison of the theatrical and uncensored cuts.

Caligula can be purchased from Unobstructed View for CAD $49.98.