Tinto Brass, Director of Caligula and Salon Kitty, Dies at 93

Tinto Brass, the Italian director of Salon Kitty and Caligula, has died aged 93. He died on 4 November 2026, according to the obituary notice, closing a career that ran from French New Wave promise to the status of cinema's most famous maestro of erotica.

Brass never objected to being called a pornographer, though most of his two dozen features stopped narrowly short of the definition. He drew the line himself: "I develop the moments of lust and desire out of the stories themselves."

His most notorious films, Salon Kitty (1976) and Caligula (1979), could be labelled sexploitation, sexist, softcore, kitsch or camp, in Susan Sontag's sense of "its essence being its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration". Yet Brass wrote and edited his own films, and his oeuvre showed a thematic and stylistic consistency that qualified him, by most definitions, as an auteur.

How did Brass begin?

He was not always a maker of erotic films. In the early 1960s, critics considered Brass one of the most interesting directors of Italy's new generation. He stood in a different category from Federico Fellini, whom he idolised, Luchino Visconti, whom he parodied, and Roberto Rossellini, for whom he worked as assistant on two films.

Born Giovanni Brass in Milan on 26 March 1933, and raised in Venice, he was the son of the lawyer Alessandro Brass and Carla Curletti. His grandfather, the Venetian painter Italico Brass, nicknamed him "Tintoretto", later shortened to Tinto. He studied law at Padua and Ferrara, graduating in 1957, then moved to Paris, where he met Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut and assisted Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque Française on a short documentary about Marc Chagall.

His first feature, To the Ends of the Earth (1963), paid homage to Ermanno Olmi's Il Posto (1961) and Godard's Vivre Sa Vie (1962), casting Sady Rebbot in the lead. Italian censors objected to its anti-Catholicism and demanded cuts. Brass refused, and the film stayed on the shelf for years.

Commercial work followed: two episodes of the omnibus comedy My Wife (1964), with Silvana Mangano and Alberto Sordi, and the spaghetti western Yankee (1966), modelled on Sergio Leone's films with Clint Eastwood. A move to swinging London produced four psychedelic films: Deadly Sweet (1967), starring Jean-Louis Trintignant; Nerosubianco (1969); The Howl (1970); and Dropout (1970), with the real-life lovers Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero, who returned with Corin Redgrave in Vacation (1971).

What changed in 1972?

The release of Deep Throat, the first pornographic picture shown in mainstream cinemas, where it made an estimated $600m, transformed Brass's prospects. "Out of the blue, one could get a big budget and sponsorship deals for explicit material. That helped me immensely," he said. "Salon Kitty would have otherwise never been made, at least not in that form."

Salon Kitty starred Helmut Berger as a power-mad SS officer, a reference to Visconti's The Damned (1969), in a tale of young women trained to entertain Nazi officers in a Berlin brothel in 1939. Its arty production design came from Ken Adam, of James Bond fame. "To me, the point is to stage the dance on the figurative volcano," Brass explained. "Because that's exactly what happens when power reaches its zenith. The protagonists celebrate and, in full knowledge of impending doom, the excesses become increasingly bizarre."

Caligula, conceived by Gore Vidal, took a prestigious cast including Peter O'Toole, John Gielgud, Helen Mirren and Malcolm McDowell. But the Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione, who co-produced, added his own explicit scenes and recut others. Both Brass and Vidal demanded their names be removed from the credits. The film remains the one Brass is most associated with.

Roger Ebert's verdict was withering: "sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash. If it is not the worst film I have ever seen, that makes it all the more shameful." The film nonetheless made money and became a cult favourite.

What does the 2023 recut change?

In 2023, Caligula: The Ultimate Cut emerged, running 178 minutes, just over 20 minutes longer than the original. The art historian Thomas Negovan pieced it together from 96 hours of raw footage, removing Guccione's material and using alternate takes closer to Vidal's script. Mirren, on screen for barely 20 minutes in 1979, now had an hour. "McDowell doesn't exactly earn the audience's sympathy," said Variety, "but the actor charts the young man's path from ambitious successor to maniacal despot with much greater clarity and believability than ever before." Brass had announced a 3D revisit to the ruined project in 2010; it never materialised, but Negovan's cut achieved a partial rehabilitation.

Later films included The Key (1983), with Stefania Sandrelli, Frank Finlay and an Ennio Morricone score; Miranda (1985), with Serena Grandi; All Ladies Do It (1992); The Voyeur (1994); Frivolous Lola (1998); Cheeky (2000); and Black Angel (2002), a remake of Visconti's Senso.

Brass's first wife, Carla Cipriani, whom he married in 1957, died in 2006. He is survived by their son, Bonifacio, and daughter, Beatrice, and by his second wife, the actor Caterina Varzi, whom he married in 2017. Negovan's recut now stands as the most likely route through which a new audience will weigh an auteur career long buried under notoriety.