by Allan Fish
(US/Italy 1979 156m) DVD1/2
Aka. Caligola; Gore Vidal’s Caligula
I have existed from the morning of the world
p Bob Guccione, Franco Rossellini d Tinto Brass, Giancarlo Lui w Bob Guccione, Gore Vidal ph Silvano Ippoliti, Tinto Brass ed Nino Baragli md Paul Clemente m Aram Khachaturian, Sergei Prokofiev art Danilo Donati cos Danilo Donati, Gregorio Simili
Malcolm McDowell (Caligula), Peter O’Toole (Tiberius), Helen Mirren (Cæsonia), John Gielgud (Nerva), Teresa Ann Savoy (Drusilla), John Steiner (Longinus), Adriana Asti (Ennia), Lori Wagner (Agrippina), Anneka di Lorenzo (Messalina), Mirella d’Angelo (Livia), Donato Placido (Proculus), Guido Mannari (Macro), Giancarlo Badessi (Claudius), Paolo Bonacelli (Cassius Chaerea), Leopoldo Trieste (Charicles), Bruno Brive (Gemellus),
As my countdown is slowly coming to an end I thought it was about time I redressed the balance. All this eulogising about the masterpieces of each given decade, yet not a word about the trash, the absolute nadir of the decade. And as we’re moving into the 1980s in a matter of weeks, it seems only fair to concentrate on the most notorious film of the 1970s, whose saga lasted several years before its first sighting in 1979, and whose controversy lasted into the early eighties; so much so that we now forget that there was a time when it was taken quite seriously in certain quarters (at least at the announcement stage). Gore Vidal had apparently gone back to the sources, to Lucretius and Tacitus, and the backing of Bob Guccione was seen as necessary funding. Perhaps they were recalling Hugh Hefner’s Playboy financed Macbeth with Roman Polanski. There was one major difference; Hefner, in addition to peddling flesh, was a film buff. Guccione was a pornographer with as much interest in the real Roman Empire as the writers of Up Pompeii. It went into production in 1977, and there were those who thought that it would cash in on the literacy of the BBC’s I, Claudius a year earlier. (more…)