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An irresistible mix of art and genitals! Featuring real sex (thanks to a porn baron), it was one of the most notorious films ever. Now Caligula's been re-cut using unseen footage
Despotic, debauched and deranged: the Roman Emperor Caligula was a cruel sadist who reputedly slept with all three of his sisters and wanted to make his horse a consul.
It comes as no great surprise, therefore, that the 1979 biopic Caligula, starring Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, John Gielgud and Peter O’Toole – produced and bankrolled by Bob Guccione, the American founder of the soft-porn magazine Penthouse – remains perhaps the most controversial and notorious movie ever made. Brass had wanted to depict Caligula as a well-meaning, fair-minded young man gradually and shockingly corrupted by power, not as the deviant lunatic he turned out to be pretty much from the start, after succeeding his great-uncle and guardian, Tiberius (O’Toole), as emperor. Now she’s in the film for an hour, looming large in the third act as just about the only person in the imperial court who dares to stand up to the monstrous emperor, played compellingly by McDowell as a kind of evil version of camp Mr Humphreys in the 1970s TV sitcom Are You Being Served?
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