Caligoola

 The Instant Play feature on Netflix leads in strange directions.  Looking for something else I found that I could with a mouseclick watch Bob Guccione's Caligula, which I never got to see back in the innocent 70s when it was scandalous -- too expensive?  Too unhip? I can;t remember.  So I watched it now.  I get to.  

It was remarkable for a couple of things.  One was how little sex there was in it.  There are a lot of naked people (including Malcolm Macdowell) and many orgy scenes that included a certain amount of wriggling and squirming, but no actual sex scenes that I could see.  (I admit I didn't watch every minute.  That's the other thing about Instant Play.  Just push ahead at the least sign of tedium.)  Another was how actually not bad it was.  I thought it would make a good double bill with Fellini Satyricon, and I don't know who'd win.  Caligula often looked like some monstrous silent movie -- some of those pre-1920 epics had a lot of nudity too -- not only in the over-the-top acting but the strange editing, as though the film had been cut before modern rules of continuity had been worked out.  The jokey tone often taken (especially by MacDowell and a splendid Helen Mirren, who keeps her clothes on mostly) is maybe understandable, but also seems reminiscent of the uncertain tone in silent epics like The Last Days of Pompeii.  

So glad to have seen it!  Now need never look at it again.