Tinto Brass, director of Caligula, dies aged 93
The Italian director of Caligula and Salon Kitty has died aged 93, his family announced. He disowned his most famous film — and still defined Euro erotica.
Programme
- Tinto Brass died aged 93; his family announced the death to Ansa on Wednesday.
- Caligula, released in 1980, starred Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, Peter O'Toole and John Gielgud.
- Brass disowned Caligula after producer Bob Guccione inserted unsimulated hardcore scenes without permission.
- A recut version of Caligula without Guccione's inserts was released in 2023; Brass did not approve it.
- Warner Bros reportedly offered Brass A Clockwork Orange before scheduling conflicts sent it to Stanley Kubrick.
Tinto Brass, the Italian director of Caligula and Salon Kitty, has died aged 93. His wife Caterina Varzi and children Bonifacio and Beatrice Brass announced the death to the Italian press agency Ansa on Wednesday.
Brass was once hailed as the "Antonioni of the 70s". History filed him elsewhere, under Euro erotica. Both labels fit, briefly.
How did a Venetian avant-gardist end up in porn's mainstream?
Born in Milan and raised in Venice, Brass entered cinema through Paris, working as an editor and archivist at the Cinémathèque (the French film archive founded by Henri Langlois). Back in Italy, he edited and assisted Roberto Rossellini, the neorealist master.
His experimental streak earned commissions, not just attention. In 1964 Umberto Eco, the novelist and semiotician, hired Brass to make two short films experimenting with visual language for the Triennale di Milano. Warner Bros, according to reports, then approached him to direct A Clockwork Orange. Scheduling conflicts intervened. The film went to Stanley Kubrick instead, which worked out for everyone except Brass's IMDb ranking.
In the 1970s he turned to erotic cinema. His early work in the genre, though crass and nudity-heavy, was politically minded — an exploration of sex, power and money as a linked system.
"I made so many erotic films because I believed eroticism to be a fundamental key to human expression and, above all, the key to portraying women," Brass told La Repubblica. "That was what interested me most."
What happened with Caligula?
His 1976 "Nazisploitation" film Salon Kitty dramatised the true story of a Berlin brothel co-opted by Nazis to spy on foreign allies and fellow officers. It caught the eye of Bob Guccione, the Penthouse founder, who hired Brass in 1979 to direct Caligula — an attempt at a star-studded, mainstream pornographic film built around ancient Rome's most feared ruler.
The cast was hardly underground: Malcolm McDowell in the title role, alongside Helen Mirren, Peter O'Toole and John Gielgud. The screenplay came from Gore Vidal, whom Brass then rewrote to include orgies, decorative phalluses and abundant female nudity.
Then it soured. Guccione shot additional unsimulated hardcore sex scenes and spliced them into the film without the director's permission. Vidal disavowed the result. So did Brass.
The film reached UK and US cinemas in 1980, with Brass credited only for "principal photography" — the industry's polite way of saying someone else finished your sentence. A recut version, stripped of Guccione's inserts, appeared in 2023. Brass had no involvement and gave it no approval.
What remains of his legacy?
In recent years Brass lived in Isola Farnese, on the outskirts of Rome. He married Varzi in 2017; she curated his archive. In an interview marking his 90th birthday, he asked for his ashes to be scattered in the Venice lagoon — a final return to the city that raised him, by way of a director who spent a career arguing that desire was serious cinema.
His filmography will keep generating arguments, re-edits and disclaimers. That, too, is a legacy.
Source: Guardian Film
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