Word: caligulas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...says, is "easily one of the worst films ever made." But then Vidal qualifies his indictment. The film does have some distinction after all: "It is not just another bad movie. It is a joke movie." What is the name of this silly film? Why Gore Vidal's Caligula, of course. Despite the exploitation of Vidal's money-coining name, it has little to do with Vidal-and even less to do with Caligula...
...exactly double the original budget, to film the life of one of history's most colorful monsters. The movie is the grandest spectacle to be shot in Italy since Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra (1963). Guccione hired some of England's best actors-Malcolm McDowell to play Caligula, Peter O'Toole for the diseased Emperor Tiberius and John Gielgud for the aristocratic Nerva. He then set about constructing half of ancient Rome: a mile-long facsimile of a 1st century street, a 100-yd.-long stadium, and a 175-ft.-long floating bordello, encrusted with gold leaf...
...much of the finished script is Vidal's is a matter of clamorous dispute. Vidal apparently saw Caligula as a kind of all-Roman boy gone wrong; the producers made him a monster from the beginning. Vidal says that most of the dialogue is his but complains that "they are playing scenes backward," reversing his meanings...
...Last Tango in Paris, so objected to her own nude scenes that she walked off the set and was replaced by an unknown English actress, Teresa Ann Savoy. McDowell believes that Last Tango gave Schneider such a phobia about nudity that she could not appear in a movie like Caligula...
...area the film makers were curiously prudish. Except for one scene, where Caligula evenhandedly deflowers both a bride and her bridegroom, their Caligula, unlike Vidal's, is as straight as the Appian Way. Says McDowell: "Historically, there is nothing to show that Caligula was in any way homosexual." That is a bit of instant scholarship that would no doubt surprise Gibbon, not to mention Suetonius...