Blu-Ray CALIGULA; camp & excessive
The notorious, dirty, much-derided, 1970s Roman epic comes onto Blu-ray disc
This week sees the Blu-ray release of the notorious Roman-era epic Caligula. Originally released in 1979, Caligula is a peculiar movie which combines a fairly literate Gore Vidal screenplay and some prestigious big-name actors (Malcolm McDowell, Peter OToole, John Gielgud and Helen Mirren) with scenes of hard-core pornography. To cut a very long and complicated story very short, Bob Guccione (the founder of Penthouse Magazine) agreed to bankroll Gore Vidals screenplay (and turn it into an expensive, 1950s-style sword and sandal epic) on the condition that Vidal increased the amount of sex and nudity in the script. Guccione then hired Tinto Brass (an Italian filmmaker famous for exploitative, erotic movies) to direct the picture. However, Vidal, Guccione and Brass all fell out with one another as the production failed to satisfy the ambitions of any of the men. As a result Guccione took the film from Brass and (with Giancarlo Lui) started to edit the film together himself. Most controversially he shot the infamous hard-core pornography with which the film would become most closely associated. As you would expect from such a messy and confused situation, the resulting film is atrocious. Just on a technical level the film is incompetent: the dialogue is poorly synched to the actors and the sound is, in general, of bad quality. Large sets were constructed, but they are shot and lit so poorly that they appear to be sparsely furnished and it ends up feeling as though each scene is being filmed within an aircraft hanger with red drapes on the walls and the occasional vase. No location is left without dozens of nude extras, as they seemingly line every wall in Caligulas villa. The cutaways from scenes of McDowell and company to the rampant and unabashed pornography are never subtle, as the atmosphere, music and lighting all change completely. Whenever the film shifts uneasily from Guccione to Brass, it doesnt become worse, exactly. It just becomes bad in a different way. The films use of music is also troubling, as although the score is quite decent, it is used inappropriately making the scenes of incest between the Emperor and his sister seem faintly romantic. At best its a little creepy. 
Of the world-class actors who foolishly participated in the production (apparently unaware of the blue movie it would become), OToole and Gielgud escape with their reputations intact. Both provide good value and Gielgud in particular gives us a glimpse of what Vidals original vision may have been with his mannered performance. Mirren and McDowell fare rather less well than their colleagues (perhaps because they are given more of the film to look bad in). McDowell is at his snarling worst as he takes all the energy and anger of his persona-defining work of the early 70s (classics like if. and A Clockwork Orange)and renders it camp and excessive. In an odd way, Caligula paints a picture of life in the Roman Empire that is not too dissimilar from recent depictions on US television, as in Spartacus: Blood and Sand or HBOs Rome. As with those shows, in Caligula Rome is a corrupt, perverted orgy of violence and sexual excess. However, the similarities end there, as this 70s version is inferior in just about every way. As a package, the Blu-ray is equally poor, with a bad image transfer and (as previously mentioned) the soundtrack fares even worse in terms of sound quality. As with so many Blu-rays, the features available on the main disc are all in standard definition. Here they come in the form of some boring deleted scenes (yes, scenes that didnt make the cut) and some trailers, as well as a bewildering Behind the Scenes which is an hour and eighteen minutes of people putting make-up on and painting sets, with no talking at all. The second disc (which wasnt available to me for review) has some interesting sounding documentaries on it (including one compellingly titled Tinto Brass: The Orgy of Power) and a bad film with a troubled production history lives or dies by the quality of its supplementary materials. What I can say is that some of the features present on the 2007 Imperial Edition DVD are absent, including feature commentaries with Helen Mirren and Malcolm McDowell. These are sorely missed on Arrow Videos UK Blu-ray release which fails to live up to the billing as the definitive version of this much-derided picture. 
Caligulais released on Blu-ray on the 10th of May in the UK and can be purchased here.