She is the most promiscuous woman in Rome
No cinema visits this week.
Mission: Impossible III (2006)
Americans, eh? There was a time when summer blockbusters were R-rated extravaganzas like Total Recall (1990) and nobody really gave two hoots that the principal audience for these films were teenage boys, who shouldn’t technically have been able to see the films unaccompanied by an adult, but who quite clearly did anyway. Then a number of bodies in the States, some of them archly-conservative Christian organisations like Focus on the Family, started issuing press releases and making noises in Washington about what they regarded as the appalling practice of marketing R-rated movies to kids. And once it became apparent that lawyers and lawsuits might be involved, there was a certain amount of backing off on the part of the studios and we find ourselves in the current era where an enormous majority of mainstream releases are deliberately tailored to be PG-13 rated in the States and 12 rated here in the UK. Amusingly, nothing has really changed in the content of the films. I enjoyed The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) as much as everyone else, but I also did think the film seemed to be awfully violent for a 12 rated movie, and wouldn’t a 15 certificate actually have been more appropriate? And so it is with the third of Tom Cruise’s appearances as Ethan Hunt: in a lot of ways this is just another blockbuster extravaganza from the 1990s, it’s just as violent as those films used to be, except without the swearing. This ludicrous cultural crisis has its origins in the introduction of the R-rating in 1968, with its proviso that a child may see a R-rated movie only when accompanied by an adult. The result in reality of this was that 10 year old kids and younger could see Basic Instinct (1992) if their parents wanted them to, or they could find anyone who looked adult enough to get them into the theatre. Whereas if the R-rating had been the equivalent of our current 18 certificate in the first place, a lot of the censorial nonsense and hypocrisy of the last 40 years simply wouldn’t have happened.
Caligula (1979)
For the record, this was the unrated version of the film with all of Bob Guccione’s hardcore inserts intact. The comparison with I, Claudius (1976) is particularly instructive, I believe, since what Caligula so noticeably lacks is a point of view. Jack Pulman’s brilliant adaptation of elements of the two Robert Graves historical novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God (both 1934) puts Claudius centre stage as narrator and observer of the extraordinary upheavals, scandals, violence, sex and murders that characterised the ruling family of the Roman Empire of the time. Tinto Brass’ film has Claudius played by the Italian equivalent of Christoper Biggins, and he has no part to play in the wider narrative, although the murder of Caligula, his wife and his daughter at the end and the sudden elevation of Claudius to Emperor are pretty much identical in both versions of the story. What is most obvious about the film is that it hasn’t been finished, hasn’t been properly edited, hasn’t been properly scored, and what has stood as the definitive Penthouse version of the film for all these years is actually a work in progress on which the work had stopped long ago. There may be a good film lurking amongst all the genitalia, but it will in all probability never be allowed to emerge. What remains is something that, for all its craziness and excess and fantasy, may resemble the actuality of Imperial Rome in more ways than we can possibly imagine.