Looking as confused as we are), Tiberius' adviser and the only decent fella in town commits suicide in a fish-tank, Caligula seizes the opportunity (and his uncle's throat), and becomes Caesar himself. We know this because he is covered in scabs and kills people in an off-hand whimsical manner. But the machinations of Imperial government grind exceedingly small and soon he is transported to the Island of Capernium, where his uncle Tiberius (the redoubtable Peter O'Toole) rules.
Caligula (Malcolm MacDowell) is happy gambolling in his Arcadian idyll with a flock of sheep and his sister Drusilla (Teresa Ann Savoy, again - practically clothes-phobic in this one) to the haunting strains of Khachaturian's 'Theme from the Onedin line'. Probably the most unpleasant film in Brass' long, and unpleasant career. That purple rubber SS uniform is SO a good look.
What happens in between is some staggeringly ill-advised musical numbers, starring Ingrid Thulin (who must have been wondering how her career had gone from Bergman to Brass inside of ten years), endless references to the paintings of Otto Dix, an awful lot of twanged suspender elastic, and some poorly charged glasses of champagne (accompanying the campest pantomime Nazis this side of Lieutenant Gruber). When he is hanged for cowardice following Vallenberg 's intervention, Margarita shoots the messenger and vows revenge on the Uber Commander. Things are going nicely to plan when the unthinkable happens Margarita falls for troubled air-man, Hans. So, it's no surprise she ends up naked on parade in a gymnasium being inspected by the clenched jawed but twinkly-eyed Vallenberg - who evidently knows what he likes. Margarita is a full-on Hitler youth, a sort of student radical in nice shiny shoes. Do you see what hes done there? Clever) where we meet our heroine Margarita (Teresa Ann Savoy, the sort of woman the seventies did so well, all hip bones, chipped teeth and a permanent cold. This scene leads masterfully into a bourgeois dinner party (Ah. 'Leave no stone unturned' he says to his flunkies.Ī frankly bizarre pig slaughtering scene then ensues, showing a sawdust strewn floor glistening trotters and strings of eviscera, to a jaunty piano piece and over dubbed grunting. A hare-brained scheme you might think and you wouldn't be wrong, but Vallenberg has the means (and the boiling sexual repression) to get these things done. Apparently men routinely give information to prostitutes in the afterglow of orgasm. He is setting up a Nazi sanctioned brothel so he can listen into confessions of disloyalty to the Furher. Vallenberg (Helmut Berger) an SS Officer who wears swastika sweat-bands and is only able to smoke a cigarette vertically, like all SS Officers, is lisping instructions to his toadying second-in-command.
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