New comment on your post "The virtues of Caligula"
Author : Tony Comstock (IP: 24.46.52.120 , ool-182e3478.dyn.optonline.net)
E-mail : tony@comstockfilms.com
URL    : http://www.tonycomstock.com
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Comment: 
I think Caligula is best understood as a movie that was made at least seven years too late to have any chance of being a success. By 1979 X-rated was a joke/box office death* and (virtually) no one was willing to take the idea of explicit sex in cinema serious. The production was marked by mixed agendas and duplicity all the way around. More over, (presumably due to a desire to be "taken seriously") Guccioni betrayed his own sybaretic impulse and set sexuality in the context of depravity; negativity was and still remains the only accepted way explicit sex that sex is depicted in "ligitimate" cinema.

*Tracking how the X-rated symbol was used between 1968 and 1980 is instructive, as is the Cyclesluts sandwich board sequence from "Owl and the Pussycat".

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