BBFC Problem Films

[peter alex]

or is it because the guts Of A Beauty films are already been censored by the Japanese and that's why the films have been passed uncut for a UK release and it you look at Eureka's cut of iron fisted monk the rape scene as been blurred and I think that's why that film was released uncut.

[nicholasrope]

Originally Posted by Mojo

I think that could very well be true.
I can?t recall the specifics, but I?m pretty sure there have been instances in the past when the BBFC have let through a number of controversial ( or previously banned or cut ) films, only to swiftly follow it up with a outright ban on a certain title, just to remind people that they are still ??doing their job??.

As long no laws are broken and no one or nothing is harmed, then all they have to do is give a certificate..

What is strange is that this film is nearly 20 years old and yet there is no trailer or anything on IMDB, the makers have made this film very mysterious.

Whilst Treasured Films are fairly new, they would have checked out this film beforehand. They are not some fly by night distributor.

[Susan Foreman]

Porno filth at The Telegraph!

Don?t tell Helen Mirren: why her most X-rated film is back

"Masterpiece or 'moral Holocaust'? Caligula, the scandalous 1979 Roman epic, has been recut - but can this reimagining silence its critics?

Its screenwriter Gore Vidal called it "easily one of the worst films ever made?; its producer, the publisher of Penthouse, Bob Guccione, cut in six-and-a-half minutes of hardcore porn that he?d secretly shot in Rome; its director Tinto Brass - who'd previously made the notorious Nazi brothel drama Salon Kitty - sued to have his name taken off the movie. As cult films go, Caligula (1979) is unrivalled when it comes to scandal, and unmatched when it comes to getting trashed by critics. Guccione compared it to Citizen Kane; Variety labelled it "a moral holocaust?.

Yet it boasted a cast to die for: Malcolm McDowell's vicious intensity in A Clockwork Orange made him the perfect choice to play the cruel and sexually deviant Roman emperor, who taunts, "I can do anything I like, to anyone. Peter O'Toole slipped lecherously into the role of Tiberius, his decadent, distrustful predecessor; John Gielgud brought a long-suffering weariness to the ageing senator Nerva, while Helen Mirren seethed behind the eyes as "the most promiscuous woman in Rome", led on a golden chain by her husband-to-be, Caligula.

It took three decades for the British Board of Film Censors to pass Guccione's two-and-a-half-hour cut to be seen in its entirety (on DVD) in the UK with an 18 certificate. Yet the story didn't end there. An entirely new version, with every frame chosen from alternative takes - Caligula: the Ultimate Cut, produced by art historian Thomas Negovan, who spent three years putting it together - is about to be released.

"I really don't think that you can overstate how important it is for cinema," he tells me. "Imagine if you knew that The Who had recorded an album that was a masterpiece, and someone stole the tapes, and what got released was some horrible iteration of it, and it was just a joke, a punchline."

So what went wrong? "You had three people with massive, massive egos," Negovan says, and "fairly early in the process, it became visible that they were more interested in combat than creation." Vidal claimed that Brass "destroyed my screenplay" and Guccione had made "a porno-cartoon" of it; Guccione observed that "Brass is a megalomaniac" and "a very sick guy", accusing him of using ugly women in the orgy scenes; while "Brass's hatred for Bob Guccione seemed to eclipse anything else on the set", Negovan says.

Was Guccione the philistine in this saga? Negovan won't say that, noting that the publisher had the vision to employ Italian designer Danilo Donati, who created sensational sets that anticipate modern opera, but admits that his view of Guccione is coloured by knowing that "he sent people to physically threaten Malcolm about talking about the film negatively. I think it?s safe to say that Guccione rarely left his house and employed men who delivered his messages."

Negovan saw his role as if he had been "dropped in the room with Gore and with Tinto and with Bob and everyone, and I had the power to make them all play nicely."

Over the years, it has become hard to separate truth from legend. "No film in history has more unfounded rumours than Caligula," Negovan says. Brass was forced to dismiss the idea that he had vetted extras for the size of their genitals; Guccione complained about O'Toole?s "little habits" (McDowell later confirmed that the late actor, who had been told that his liver could not tolerate booze, "became addicted to marijuana... and was always incredibly stoned").

One rumour had it that when Mirren's Caesonia delivers Caligula's child, the graphic scene featured an actual live birth. "Having seen all the footage, I can say with absolute certainty that this is completely false," Negovan says. Guccione also spun a myth about "smuggling the film out [of Italy] with it wrapped around the arms and legs of his associates," Negovan says. "Anyone that has seen what 96 hours of film negative looks like knows that that is impossible. It's a semi-truck worth of footage."

Guccione described it being moved furtively from London to Paris to New York. "There was a story that it was going to be destroyed," Negovan says. In fact, it was listed as an asset when Penthouse was sold in 2018 and remained so through a series of owners before the present owners asked the 52-year-old, who has written books on Art Nouveau, Symbolism and German Expressionism, to look at it. Contrary to one article that suggested he'd been obsessed with the film since it came out ("I was nine years old"), the Chicago-born Negovan had never seen the 1979 film (and wouldn't, until well into making his own) but thought the footage should be preserved properly. He soon found his curiosity piqued, however, although there were technical challenges in doing anything with it.

"The negatives that were missing were the ones used to create the original print," he notes, explaining that in some cases there were just scraps of footage that were only a half a second long. He and the film's editor Aaron Shaps decided that if they needed a shot they didn't have, they would have to take it from a positive print of the original film (made to create the prints for cinema projection). But as they went through it, they began to realise that in nearly every case, there was a take "that we felt was better in some way". They restored the grand set-up shots and discarded the original cut's preference for the most "over the top' acting.

In places the result is revelatory, as if by burnishing a fairground token a shining Roman medallion appears. In Guccione's version, when O?Toole's Emperor Tiberius commands Caligula to "Do your dance, boy" - referencing how the future emperor got his name as a child in battle dress and caligae (boots) performing for troops on military campaigns led by his father, Germanicus - the dramatic power of the sequence falls flat. The camera seems unable to concentrate on the dance when there is nudity on show. But Negovan uses a wide-shot that captures how McDowell transforms Caligula's humiliation into arrogant display. It?s brilliant.

Negovan considers McDowell's performance in The Ultimate Cut "breathtaking... I think it's something that anyone with an interest in classical performance is going to be incredibly inspired by." He also notes how Guccione correctly identified Mirren, already a stage star with the RSC for her Ophelia and Lady Macbeth but still underused on screen, as an "important talent".

"Guccione was extremely vocal that he felt the secret ingredient in that film was Helen Mirren, [whom] he said was going to be a huge star. But then, why did you only put her in for nine minutes?" Negovan set about correcting what he saw as a waste. "I look at this like it?s a lost Helen Mirren film. It?s got nearly a full hour of footage of her, and she's flawless. I mean, she's so visibly powerful, and Malcolm is so visibly at a peak."

He also reinstated some of the original performances. British actress Teresa Ann Savoy, who'd starred in Salon Kitty (1976), had been brought in to play Caligula's sister and lover Julia Drusilla after Last Tango in Paris's Maria Schneider walked out in protest at the nude scenes she was expected to perform. Savoy, Negovan says, "had a beautiful, delicate voice. They dubbed her in the 1980 version... There were a lot of performances in The Ultimate Cut where we were able to restore the original performer's voice."

Tougher decisions lay ahead. Part of the cult appeal of Caligula lay in its debauched approach to sex and violence. Negovan had to make a call about what to do with Guccione's additional material, which included much fellatio and an eye-popping lesbian triste that the publisher intercut with an erotic nude scene between Mirren, McDowell and Savoy.

"We drew the line at what was arguably pornography, meaning penetration or ejaculation," Negovan says. "[But] Tinto was no saint, there was explicit sexual activity on Tinto's set? It comes back to that idea of what supports the narrative. Like, do you need to see semen for this to be a better movie? I believe the movie is shocking enough without looking for a cheap shot. I feel like the 1980 version is wall-to-wall cheap shots, just trying to shock people. I think the love scene between Caligula and his sister and his wife is more potent because it's not surrounded by so much gratuitous sex."

After Caligula: The Ultimate Cut was shown at Cannes last year, a review in Variety suggested that Negovan errs too much on the side of good taste, losing some of the original's transgressive quality; "Who?s watching this gaudy monstrosity for nuance?" it asks. An interesting comparison is the "necrophilia" scene, in which Caligula's beloved Drusilla dies, and the young emperor begins desperately kissing her dead body and pulling her upright, as if trying to bring her back to life. Negovan felt that it was more important to see how her death destroys Caligula's belief in the gods ? "the idea that he throws the spear into the statue of Isis is a more important climax than him licking her body."

He explains: "There?s no sense of prudishness in my repertoire. But there is a sense of taste [and] the drive for a meaningful narrative was so strong that there was no part of me that looked at a shot and said, "Oh, he?s licking her. That's really cool-looking. We should put that in.""

He stresses, "I did feel that I had to listen really carefully to everything that Tinto said he wanted and be his advocate," but he adds, "I think that it was very clear to me early on that [just as] there was no Gore Vidal version, there was no Tinto Brass version that was possible." The idea of Vidal liking the movie had already gone by the time Donati designed a sex dungeon with a working elevator and a three-storey decapitation machine, he says. "Under no circumstances would Gore Vidal like this version of the movie. Gore would have hated it."

Vidal died in 2012, Guccione in 2010. Brass is now 91, and reportedly suffering with dementia. But he responded, like others, with "aggressive indifference" when Negovan approached him. "There's a long list of people that I contacted, and the amount of hostility that I met with was very confusing to me at first, because I did not understand the depth and breadth of wounds that had occurred through the process of making, completing and releasing the original film."

McDowell, though, who felt the original release had damaged his career, got in touch and has been hugely supportive. Negovan hasn't heard from Mirren. But, he adds, "to me, this is the truest version of Caligula that you could have. To go from being called 'a moral Holocaust' to premiering at the Cannes Film Festival - what an incredible redemption.""

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

I bought the fancy Arrow dvd of Caligula years (decades?) ago and have watched it once.

I didn't hate it or anything just had no desire to watch it again.

[Susan Foreman]

Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs

I bought the fancy Arrow dvd of Caligula years (decades?) ago and have watched it once.

I didn't hate it or anything just had no desire to watch it again.

Same here - the 4-dsc DVD version

It's an interesting curio, but not much else... and boy is it boring in places !!

[Justin101]

The article was too long so I stopped reading it haha what is the general gist of it please haha. What is the new cut about?

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by Justin101

The article was too long so I stopped reading it haha what is the general gist of it please haha. What is the new cut about?

Just like the film.

I didn't even read the article. Just looked at the pictures.

[Nosferatu@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by Justin101

The article was too long so I stopped reading it haha what is the general gist of it please haha. What is the new cut about?

I asked ChatGTP to summarise it in a series of bullet points, which I think it did very well.

Here's a summary of the article on "Caligula: The Ultimate Cut":

- **Release and Restoration**: The film has been restored and recut by art historian Thomas Negovan, utilizing never-before-seen footage to align more closely with the original vision of director Tinto Brass and screenwriter Gore Vidal. The restored version, which premiered at Cannes Film Festival in 2023, will be released in the UK and Ireland on August 9, 2024【11?source】【12?source】.

- **Cast and Performances**: The film stars Malcolm McDowell as Caligula, with Helen Mirren, Peter O'Toole, and John Gielgud in key roles. This version enhances the performances of McDowell and Mirren, with Mirren's role significantly expanded compared to the original release【12?source】【14?source】.

- **Production History**: The original 1979 film faced significant controversy, with producer Bob Guccione adding explicit content without the involvement of the main cast or the director, leading to both Brass and Vidal disowning the project. The "Ultimate Cut" removes these additions and aims to present a more coherent narrative【13?source】.

- **Content and Themes**: The film explores the rise and fall of Roman Emperor Caligula, showcasing themes of power, depravity, and madness. The restored version includes crucial scenes and character arcs previously omitted, providing a fuller portrayal of Caligula's descent【11?source】【13?source】.

- **Critical Reception**: Reviews highlight the improved narrative coherence and the enriched character portrayals. The film remains visually opulent and continues to push boundaries with its depiction of excess and debauchery, albeit without the hardcore scenes added by Guccione【12?source】【13?source】.

For further details, you can read the full articles from [Blazing Minds](https://www.blazingminds.co.uk/calig...ut-uk-release/), [UPI](https://www.upi.com/Entertainment_Ne...1261688502751/), and [Empire](https://www.empireonline.com/movies/...-ultimate-cut/).

[Nosferatu@Cult Labs]

Mark Kermode gives a good overview/explainer of how the Caligula became such a problematical film for the BBFC and how this new version, The Ultimate Cut, is now something that Malcolm McDowell is happy with.