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Bhen Malcolm McDowell first heard that a new version of Caligula was being worked on, he simply rolled his eyes. “I did that,” he says. “Because I never wanted to talk about that damn movie again.” The actor, famous for roles in If… And Clockwork Orange had high hopes when he originally signed up for Caligulaa portrait of the Roman emperor based on a screenplay by the esteemed author Gore Vidal, directed by Italian filmmaker Tinto Brass and starring Helen Mirren, Peter O’Toole and Sir John Gielgud.

While Brass and Vidal did not quite see eye to eye, the real problem came with the film’s financier, Bob Guccione, the founder of the erotic magazine penthouseMcDowell had already expressed his concerns before the film was shot, to which Vidal simply told him: “Think of him as one of the Warner Brothers.” But Guccione fell out with the director and fired Brass.

It got worse. After the film was shot, Guccione secretly filmed pornographic scenes with some penthouse girls and inserted the footage into the film. When McDowell saw the final version, released in 1980 almost four years after filming was completed, he felt cheated. “I advise people never to watch it. It’s a terrible film: exploitative and pornographic.” Mirren, who plays Caesonia, Caligula’s wife, took it with humor, calling the film “an irresistible mixture of art and genitalia.” But critics were appalled. “A trough of depraved swill,” wrote The New York Observer‘s Rex Reed, while fellow critic Roger Ebert called it “disgusting, utterly worthless, disgraceful trash.” McDowell was shocked. “I was really very depressed about it. Actually. I think I went into a depression. It really affected me. Frankly, I think it was one of the reasons I left England.” The actor found a new home in Los Angeles.

I ask McDowell if he ever discussed it with his good friends and collaborators, directors Stanley Kubrick or Lindsay Anderson. “I don’t think they cared! I mean, it’s like making your bed and having to lie in it, you know? I mean, look, it’s just one of those horrible things. It was an anomaly. Because normally you have a production company with a certain track record, you have a studio behind you… they’re really very interested in the film going according to the script. Not in a megalomaniacal way. Basically, I said to him at one point, ‘Bob, why didn’t you play the part yourself?'”

Guccione at least had the sense to hire Danilo Donati, the visionary Italian production designer who later designed the unusual sets for Mike Hodges’ Flash Gordon. Likewise, Donati’s work for Caligula from the elaborate sets to the costumes, jewelry and even wigs. As Guccione once said in an interview with penthouse“Danilo Donati is the real star of Caligula… next to him, Brass is a rude and uncomprehending lout.”

McDowell advised his agents never to forward requests that relate to Caligula Everything changed for him when Thomas Negovan, an art gallery owner and short filmmaker, was hired by the management company that was penthouse brand. “Many people had told them over the years that the archives around Caligula were remarkable,” Negovan says. “And they basically asked me to judge that statement.”

Negovan, who was brought into the project in 2019, had the jazzed-up Caligula“I was never a Caligula “I was a Malcolm McDowell fan,” he says. But the producer soon learned about the original film. “It’s a train wreck in every way. I understand the charm of it now. Everyone likes to watch a car crash. So there’s this idea of ​​a horrific movie spectacle with a huge budget that has its charm, and I understand that. But the problem is that people like Malcolm McDowell have been the butt of that joke for 50 years.”

What Negovan discovered in a Los Angeles warehouse were dusty cans full of original camera negatives and audio material. All of it was unused, never seen or heard before. “Nobody had had reason to go through all those boxes for decades,” he says. “So they knew it was there. They’d just never opened them.” That was enough to begin a painstaking process of reconstructing the film to resemble Vidal and Brass’s original vision.

It has now been running for almost three hours, Caligula: The ultimate cut is a completely different caliber to its lurid predecessor. While there is still some eroticism in some scenes – there are still plenty of erect penises – the filthy sexploitation feel has been freely edited out. “It wasn’t meant to be a porn film,” says Negovan. “You think Helen Mirren and John Gielgud would have taken a job in a porn film with no plot? No, that’s the point. Like there was a script. There were incredible sets, incredible costumes. And people really sweated to make this film.”

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Negovan also had trouble and was initially unsuccessful when he tried to contact McDowell, Brass and Mirren. He only managed to reach McDowell when he contacted Mark Critch, the creator of the TV show, via Instagram. Son of a Kritchin which the actor plays the lead role. It was Critch who advised McDowell to watch the new cut. “I was lying in bed, in Newfoundland, in St. John’s, the most remote rock on the east coast of America,” McDowell recalls. “And I was stunned – it all came flooding back. And I was kind of vaguely stunned. I sat there in silence for quite a while, thinking about what I had seen.”

It took McDowell back to his original intentions of playing Caligula, who was notorious for looting the treasury of his predecessor Tiberius (played by O’Toole in the film). “I mean, he was very popular because he was always giving away gold coins to the people. But I think people really liked him. He was quite a character. And he was something of an original. I decided to play him as an anarchist destroying the Roman Empire from above.”

As a starting point, Negovan revisited Vidal’s original script. “What I had in my head and in my heart was like a Venn diagram: Here’s Malcolm’s circle, here’s Gore’s, here’s Tinto’s and here’s Bob’s. Bob, hiring people like Danilo Donati to build these incredible sets was completely against Gore’s vision. But if you look at what everyone wanted, there’s a room, a flag in the middle of that circle, which gives a sense of realism and historical accuracy.”

With so much new footage, Caligula: The ultimate cut certainly rescues the film’s reputation from its cheesy doldrums. Helen Mirren’s role, for example, is greatly expanded, from 17 minutes of material in the Guccione cut to nearly an hour here. “The last 45 minutes of the film are completely new,” adds McDowell. “Or have never been seen before. I guess Guccione just got bored and said, ‘Let’s just end this and just have him killed and that’s it. Get it out.'”

Those who feared the film had been whitewashed can rest assured. The scene in which a jealous Caligula rapes the virgin Livia and her groom, the officer Proculus, at their wedding has remained unchanged. When Critch suggested to McDowell that he should screen the film for a children’s charity event at St John’s, believing the film’s pornographic elements had been removed, he was shocked. “I said, ‘Yes. But this isn’t porn!’ That was Caligula,” McDowell recalls gloatingly. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Nevertheless, McDowell is delighted with the new cut, because a lost performance he gave half a century ago has been resurrected. “I’m delighted that the real film is now available for everyone to see.” His only sadness is for Brass, who is now 91 years old. “He’s still alive, but I think he’s suffering from some kind of dementia. And so he’ll never really know about this new cut. I think he would be very happy with his film, because all the important scenes are in it. And they’re really beautiful.” No more Caligula everyone’s joke. As McDowell says, “Even nearly 50 years later, there’s nothing like it.”

“Caligula: The Ultimate Cut” will be in cinemas from August 9th