Francis is portrayed as a wispy-bearded youth with a glow in his eye; if we didn’t know he was a saint we might think he was a little tetched in the head. That’s especially true when he leaves his sickbed and walks out onto a rooftop to catch a bird. It’s not the bird that matters; it’s the way he walks, waving his arms and teetering back and forth, always about to fall off. Surely even a saint can keep his balance.
After a suitable period of standing on the rooftop, Francis goes out into the fields and finds there a ruined church. He takes unto himself a band of followers, not omitting the obligatory local aristocrat who comes to scoff and stays to plaster, and they rebuild the church. The local church authorities, who are gowned and bejeweled as if they had first dibs on Marco Polo’s plunder, are scandalized. Who ever heard of a Christian who embraced poverty and humility?
But Francis perseveres, and eventually the local bad guys set his church on fire. I guess it’s set on fire, anyway; clouds of smoke pour from behind the church, but we see no flames. Did Zeffirelli decide to go with a smudge pot and save the rebuilt church? I dunno, but this is the kind of movie where you think of things like that. Anything to stay awake.
Now comes the big scene, where Francis and his followers go to see Pope Innocent, who is played by Alec Guinness. Zeffirelli has constructed a set for the papal chambers that makes Anthony Quinn’s digs in Shoes of the Fisherman look like the ballroom of the Honolulu Hilton.
Dozens—perhaps hundreds—of altar boys swing incense burners. Squadrons of Swiss Guards swing open massive bronze doors. The College of Cardinals sits almost immobile, their robes so heavy they can hardly move. Scheming papal advisers are arrayed behind the throne. And Guinness is costumed in such a manner as to remind us of the ecclesiastical fashion show in Fellini Roma. Did Zeffirelli mean his scene to be satire, or merely wretched excess? Also, does the pope always have 200 divines on hand just to hold an audience for a few barefoot monks?
Well, believe it or not (there are gasps of dismay from the cardinals), the pope comes out in favor of poverty and self-denial, and gives Francis his blessing. Whereupon Francis presumably goes out and incorporates the Franciscan Order, although that’s not in this movie; maybe we’ll get a sequel. Zeffirelli himself says you can’t think too much about his movie; you have to accept it as a simple experience. “You have to hang your brains outside by the door before you go into this film,” he said, and it looks as if he started with himself.
Caligula
(Starring Malcolm McDowell, John Gielgud, Peter O’Toole; 1980)
Caligula is sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash. If it is not the worst film I have ever seen, that makes it all the more shamefuclass="underline" People with talent allowed themselves to participate in this travesty. Disgusted and unspeakably depressed, I walked out of the film after two hours of its 170-minute length. That was on Saturday night, as a line of hundreds of people stretched down Lincoln Avenue, waiting to pay $7.50 apiece to become eyewitnesses to shame.
I wanted to tell them . . . what did I want to tell them? What I’m telling you now. That this film is not only garbage on an artistic level, but that it is also garbage on the crude and base level where it no doubt hopes to find its audience. Caligula is not good art, it is not good cinema, and it is not good porn.
I’ve never had anything against eroticism in movies. There are X-rated films I’ve enjoyed, from the sensuous fantasies of Emmanuelle to the pop absurdities of Russ Meyer. I assume that the crowds lining up for admission to the Davis Theater were hoping for some sort of erotic experience; I doubt that they were spending $15 a couple for a lesson on the ancient history of Rome.
All I can say is that the makers of Caligula have long since lost touch with any possible common erotic denominator, and that they suggest by the contents of this film that they are jaded, perverse, and cruel human beings. In the two hours of this film that I saw, there were no scenes of joy, natural pleasure, or good sensual cheer. There was, instead, a nauseating excursion into base and sad fantasies.
You have heard that this is a violent film. But who could have suspected how violent, and to what vile purpose, it really is? In this film, there are scenes depicting a man whose urinary tract is closed, and who has gallons of wine poured down his throat. His bursting stomach is punctured with a sword. There is a scene in which a man is emasculated, and his genitals thrown to dogs, who eagerly eat them on the screen. There are scenes of decapitation, evisceration, rape, bestiality, sadomasochism, necrophilia.
These scenes—indeed, the movie itself—reflect a curiously distanced sensibility. Nobody in this film really seems to be there. Not the famous actors like Malcolm McDowell and (very briefly) Peter O’Toole and John Gielgud, whose scenes have been augmented by additional porn shot later with other people and inserted to spice things up. Not the director (who removed his credit from the film). Not the writer (what in the world can it mean that this movie is “Adapted from an Original Screenplay by Gore Vidal”?) Not even the sound track. The actors never quite seem to be speaking their own words, which are so badly dubbed that they sometimes seem at right angles to the drama itself.
Caligula has been photographed and directed with such clumsiness and inelegance that pieces of action do not seem to flow together, the plot is incomprehensible, the events are framed as if the camera is not sure where it is, and everything is shot in muddy, ugly, underlit dungeon tones. The music is also execrable.
So what are we left with? A movie that may be invulnerable to a review like this one. There are no doubt people who believe that if this movie is as bad as I say it is, it must be worth seeing. People who simply cannot believe any film could be this vile. Some of those people were walking out of the Davis before I did Saturday night; others were sitting, depressed, in the lobby. That should not, I suppose, be surprising.
The human being is a most curious animal, often ready to indulge himself in his base inclinations, but frequently reluctant to trust his better instincts. Surely people know, going in, that Caligula is worthless. Surely they know there are other movies in town that are infinitely better. Yet here they are at Caligula. It is very sad.
My friendly recommendation is that they see The Great Santini, to freshen their minds and learn to laugh and care again in a movie. People learn fast. “This movie,” said the lady in front of me at the drinking fountain, “is the worst piece of shit I have ever seen.”
Camille 2000
(Directed by Radley Metzger; starring Daniéle Gaubert, Nino Castelnuovo; 1969)
It is said that Orson Welles saw John Ford’s Stagecoach 200 times before directing Citizen Kane. According to a press release here on my desk, Radley Metzger has seen John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre 103 times. That was not enough.
I think Metzger was better—or worse, that is—back when he had only seen it maybe twenty times. Blinking his eyes as he emerged into the sunlight, he directed I, a Woman, which was the worst movie of all time (up until then).
Then he went back to see Sierra Madre another, say, two dozen times, and after that he directed Carmen, Baby, which was almost as bad as I, a Woman but made less money. Then, a glutton for culture, he saw Sierra Madre forty-one more times, and made Therese and Isabel, which was even worse than I, a Woman.