Just what the world needed, another re-edit of Caligula…
As quixotic quests go, it’s a doozy: take 96 hours of raw footage filmed during one of the craziest and most tumultuous shoots in movie history and attempt to create a new version of the film described by Variety on release in 1979 as “a moral Holocaust”.
Step forward Thomas Negovan: the man who rescued Caligula. “There were definitely a lot of points in the last three years where I thought I was crazy,” he says. “I thought: ‘Is anyone going to care about this?’” But, in fact one of the most important entities in the industry, the Cannes film festival, cared very much, booking the new-and-possibly-improved version a premiere in its prestigious Cannes Classics strand, a section of the festival generally dedicated to celebrating the art of cinema at its finest.
“And so all of a sudden, I thought: ‘OK, all the therapy bills are worth it,’” says Negovan.
Screened for the first time on Wednesday, the 2023 version is billed as Caligula: The Ultimate Cut, and Negovan is keen to point out that, “The thing that’s bizarrely unique about it is it’s almost like the version that was released in 1979 is the deviant version. Ours is closer to what was originally intended. Even the word restoration … I don’t know what word works, but it isn’t a restoration. I don’t know what to call it.”
Well, the question of “what was originally intended” with Caligula is, at best, vexed; not much of Gore Vidal’s original vision made it off the page and onto the screen, and whatever Tinto Brass intended as director was kind of undercut by Bob Guccione locking him out of the editing suite and shooting his own additional hardcore footage. Brass has already disowned this new version and threatened Penthouse with legal action, and I’ve read one report suggesting some of Guccione’s footage remains in the “ultimate” cut. It might be closer to the “original” intentions, but I don’t know if “close” is the right word at all…
I just don’t know why it exists, cos there’s already an alternate edit of the thing that came out on the “Imperial Edition” DVD which I gather was a somewhat “kinder, gentler” version (I have that DVD but have never got around to watching the alt cut). I understand Negovan’s frustration that the 1979 version didn’t do the actors the favours he thought they deserved, I understand his version evidently does much better at that… I just don’t really know why he did it when the other edit already existed. Who at whatever company runs Penthouse now (Bob Guccione left the planet back in 2010) was interested enough to have not only continued to preserve the original material, but to commission yet another edit of it? Cos what really interests me is that Negovan went back to the original elements (which I’m kind of amazed still exist) and apparently remade almost the entire thing from alternate takes (also enhancing a few scenes whose effects were never really properly finished) so it’s practically a new film.
But I like the old one for all of its undeniable issues. The 1979 Caligula is one of the most genuinely perplexing artifacts of its era, riotously excessive and monstrous on multiple levels. And yet the frankly stupid amount of money spent on it actually shows on the screen, Danilo Donati’s sets are astounding, and the whole thing actually has a weird beauty to it. It was made in possibly the only time it could have been made, and the fact that it was made at all and ended up like it did is baffling. There are, obviously, films I like a lot more because, let’s face it, they’re much better made, but Caligula fascinates me in a way those films don’t. Their existence makes sense in a way that Caligula‘s doesn’t.
Needless to say, I’ll watch this new version as soon as I can get my hands on it, though I wonder how it’ll fare these days at the hands of the OFLC here… having said which, I was astonished to discover about 18 months or so ago that the OFLC actually passed the uncut original for release; the full 156-minute film did get an X-rating in the mid-80s in that brief window when X-rated films here were still allowed to contain violent content, but it was then knocked back for decades until Umbrella somehow secured an R-rating for it in August ’21. Not that they’ve actually done anything to release it here yet, though, and I’m wondering what’ll happen to it now Negovan’s recut is a thing.
