Caligula: The Untold Story (1982)

When Caligula came out in 1979 a lot of people thought it was the last word when it came to depicting the depravity of the Roman Empire.

Then along came Joe D’Amato who figured he could do something much more depraved. So in 1982 he made Caligula...The Untold Story (Caligola...la storia mai raccontata).

At this point I should note that Tinto Brass was the original director of the 1979 movie but had his name removed from the credits. Simply for convenience I’ll refer to it as Tinto Brass’s Caligula.

When seeing these movies you have to remember that they’re only mildly exaggerated versions of the accounts that we have from ancient historians. Of course we also have to remember that almost all of the primary sources describing Caligula’s reign are lost. What we have are much later accounts that are absurdly biased and unreliable. Almost everything written about Caligula at the time and in the two centuries after his death was written by people with axes to grind. The generally accepted story, that Caligula was a debauched madman and a cruel sadistic tyrant, might well be quite untrue. As Napoleon said, history is just lies that have been agreed upon.

But in the popular imagination Caligula remains a lunatic and a tyrant and that’s the view of him that we get in both Tinto Brass’s movie and in D’Amato’s movie (or at least in the first half of D’Amato’s movie).

Caligula: The Untold Story gets us into the cruelty and depravity right from the start. Caligula (played by David Brandon) comes across a nice young Christian girl named Livia innocently flirting with her boyfriend, the son of a consul. Caligula rapes the girl, she tries to kill him, he kills her and then has her boyfriend killed. We get the message that Caligula is not a nice guy.

Caligula is also troubled by dreams. So we get the idea that he’s perhaps not too stable mentally.

Part of his mental instability is that he thinks he’s a god. Literally a god. He also has grandiose plans to make himself the greatest man in history by constructing a vast new imperial palace that will be the wonder of the world for generations to come.

And we find out that there are lots of people plotting against the Emperor’s life. He’s made a lot of enemies. And a lot of people think he’s ruining the empire. Doing things like making his horse a senator. And turning the Vestal Virgins into whores.

One of the enemies he’s made is a young Egyptian woman, Miriam (Laura Gemser). Miriam is a freed slave, a priestess of the Egyptian god Anubis and she also happened to be Livia’s best friend. Miriam wants revenge. She’s prepared to make herself one of Caligula’s whores in order to get close enough to him to get that revenge.

This is essentially a movie in two halves. The first half is typical (if extreme) Romansploitation with extended orgy scenes (including a lot of hardcore footage) and some very very brutal scenes of murder and torture. The second half is a totally different movie. It’s a bizarre love story. There’s not a huge amount of graphic violence in the second half, and there’s almost no sex and nudity.

It all hinges on a change in Miriam’s feelings, and in Caligula’s. It presents quite a challenge to David Brandon. He has to make Caligula human. That’s not to suggest that we actually come to feel sorry for Caligula, we still know he’s insane and evil, but we have to be convinced that he is capable of suffering, and maybe even capable of love. Brandon does a pretty effective job. His performance is actually very good indeed.

Laura Gemser faces an even bigger challenge, playing a woman whose feelings are very conflicting and contradictory and possibly puzzling even to herself. She does a fine job. The change in Miriam makes some sense. When she enters Caligula’s service she is a virgin. She then discovers, to her own surprise, that she likes sex a lot. She likes sex with the emperor very much indeed. If a woman is having very satisfying regular sex with a man it’s certainly possible that she’s going to develop feelings for him. And Caligula, for all his cruelties to others, treats Miriam with surprising kindness. Miss Gemser seems rather detached at times but that’s probably a plus. Had she tried to give an emotionally charged performance it would have seemed rather fake. The movie works better if we’re not quite sure what Miriam’s feelings are, given that she doesn’t really know her own heart either.

The scene in which Miriam suddenly decides that she can’t kill Caligula upsets a lot of people who find it unconvincing. I have no idea why. Killing someone isn’t that easy. For a woman to kill a man with whom she’s just made tender love isn’t easy at all. Miriam realises that she just isn’t a killer. Some people aren’t. She has, against her will and contrary to her expectations, discovered that she feels a strange closeness to this man. I suspect that those who have problems with this scene don’t know much about women.

Perhaps it’s the first time Caligula has ever shown kindness to another person.

For the rest of the movie both Miriam and Caligula try to make sense of their feelings. Caligula is still crazy, but he’s now a psycho with emotions rather than an emotionless psycho. Screenwriters D’Amato and George Eastman don’t try to convince us that Caligula is now a nice guy aqnd that we should see him as a romantic hero. Caligula has simply developed some complexity. Perhaps Caligula thinks he’s a god because he’s never known what it is to be a man, with normal male emotions. It’s much too late for him and he’s done too many unforgivable things and made too many enemies, but perhaps he can still find some small measure of redemption. Perhaps.

So this is a seriously weird movie. The fact that it departs quite a bit from the historical record isn’t too much of a problem, given that the historical record is so incomplete and unreliable.

Severin’s release (on DVD and Blu-Ray) offers an excellent transfer without any extras. This is the full uncut version which includes a great deal of hardcore footage and it’s about forty minutes longer than the softcore version. I don’t have a huge problem with the hardcore footage but the hardcore stuff in the orgy scene goes on for much too long and slows the movie down.

Compared to the 1979 Caligula this is a very low-budget effort. That’s something you just have to accept. You’re just not going to get big budget production values without a big budget.

There’s certainly plenty of trashiness here, but there’s also an attempt to take a completely fresh view of the subject matter.

Most reviewers don’t give this movie a chance at all. They go into it expecting trash and having already decided to give it a blisteringly bad snarky review. If you approach the movie with an open mind it’s rather interesting. It’s not in any sense a sequel to or a remake of Tinto Brass’s film. This is a whole different movie that takes an entirely different approach.

D’Amato doesn’t entirely succeed but in its own way this is quite a fascinating movie and I’m going to recommend it, provided you can cope with some gruesomeness and a great deal of explicit hardcore sex.