Tinto Brass, the filmmaker whose most famous work was the controversial Caligula, has died. His family announced his death to the Italian media on Wednesday, according to Variety. He was 93.
Although the director made more than two dozen movies including
Vacation (1971) which won “Best Italian Film” at the Venice Film Festival that year, he’ll best be remembered for Caligula, a movie The New York Times called “the most expensive pornographic movie ever made.”
Brass directed most of the film about the depraved Roman emperor, whose cast included Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, and Peter O’Toole, but one of its producers, Penthouse founder Bob Guccione, and filmmaker Giancarlo Lui stepped in during post-production to add scenes of hardcore sex. Both Tinto, who made a name for himself in exploitation cinema with a movie about a Nazi brothel called Salon Kitty (1976), and screenwriter Gore Vidal asked for their names to be removed.
Brass’ family was already well established in the art world when he was born Giovanni Brass in Milan on March 26, 1933. His grandfather, Italico Brass, was a painter and art dealer in Venice and nicknamed the young Brass “Tintoretto,” which family members later abbreviated. He studied law before getting into film at Cinémathèque Française where he worked as assistant director to Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens. He got his break in cinema assisting Federico Fellini and Roberto Rossellini before making his directorial debut with Chi Lavora è Perduto, which won “Best First Work” at the Venice Festival. A few years later, his film, I Am What I Am, won the Golden Lion at the festival.
He transitioned into erotica with Salon Kitty, which also had elements of political satire. Guccione took note of his work on that film and approached him to film Caligula. He agreed to make the movie with the caveat that it couldn’t be pornographic, instead making it something of a political satire. Guccione banned him from the editing room and finished the film himself.
“It’s not just the explicit sex that immediately identifies this as a pornographic picture,” the Times wrote in its review. “It’s the marvelously flatfooted dialogue that is always a little out of sync with what we’re seeing. ‘Better be careful, sir,’ one courtier warns another very late in the game, after most of Rome has been defiled, deflowered, disemboweled or just sent to Gaul.” The Stinkers Bad Movie Awards nominated the film in its Worst Movie category, but it lost to Robert Altman’s Popeye.
The controversy didn’t stymie his career, though. Brass directed more than a dozen films, including some shorts, in the years that followed, though none garnered the same fame (or infamy) as Caligula. He suffered a suspected cerebral hemorrhage in 2010 after which he retired from filmmaking.
The legacy of Caligula continued, though. An “Imperial Edition” cut of the film excised Guccione’s porn in 2007 and tried to get it closer to how Brass envisioned it but it wasn’t until 2023, when an “Ultimate Cut,” the adhered closer to Vidal’s script, started earning the film rave reviews. Brass was not happy with it, though, releasing a statement before it premiered at Cannes that said he was sure it would not meet his artistic vision.
The director long believed his contributions to cinema, including the political subtexts of his film were overlooked. In the book Caligula and the Fight for Artistic Freedom, he’s quoted as saying, “I put two big balls and a big cock between the legs of Italian cinema,” meaning it as a point of pride.
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