Italian director drawn to the erotic best known for his 1979 film Caligula, which is now regarded as a cult favourite
No matter how one defines the films of the director Tinto Brass, who has died aged 93, they manage, in most cases, to keep a distance, however narrowly, from pornography. Although the Italian maestro of erotica never objected to being called a pornographer, he made the distinction by claiming: “I develop the moments of lust and desire out of the stories themselves.”
There is no doubt that most of his two dozen features, the most notorious being Salon Kitty (1976) and Caligula (1979), could be variously labelled sexploitation (the female nude shown purely for sexual or commercial reasons), sexist, softcore (no erections or ejaculations), kitsch (bad taste) and camp (“its essence being its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration”, in Susan Sontag’s definition).
If a director who has a personal stamp, and whose oeuvre has a thematic and stylistic consistency, is considered an auteur, then Brass, who wrote and edited his own films, would qualify. Needless to say, he was in a different category from Federico Fellini, whom he idolised; Luchino Visconti, whom he parodied; and Roberto Rossellini, for whom he was assistant on two films. Yet, in the early 1960s, Brass was thought of as one of the most interesting directors of the new generation.
He had met Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and others in Paris, and assisted Henri Langlois, the eccentric chief of the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, on a short documentary on the artist Marc Chagall. For his first feature, To the Ends of the Earth (1963), Brass paid homage to Ermanno Olmi’s Il Posto (1961) – both films are about a young man’s first job in a large, dehumanising office – as well as to Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie (1962), by casting Sady Rebbot, who played a murderous pimp in the earlier film, in the lead.
Although Italian, the film had a French new wave feeling about it. Unfortunately, the censors objected to a certain anti-Catholicism and demanded cuts. Brass refused, and the film stayed on the shelf for a number of years.
Born in Milan but brought up in Venice, he was the son of Carla Curletti and Alessandro Brass, a lawyer. His grandfather, the Venetian painter Italico Brass, encouraged his grandson Giovanni’s artistic leanings and nicknamed him “Tintoretto”, later shortened to Tinto. After studying law at the universities of Padua and Ferrara, graduating in 1957, he went to the Cinémathèque Française, and on his return to Italy worked for Rossellini.
Brass entered commercial cinema by directing two episodes of the omnibus comedy My Wife (1964), starring Silvana Mangano and Alberto Sordi, and a spaghetti western, Yankee (1966), which he tried to make as close as possible to Sergio Leone’s hit films with Clint Eastwood, many similar stylistic devices.
A move to swinging London resulted in four weird psychedelic films: Deadly Sweet (1967), a thriller starring Jean-Louis Trintignant; Nerosubianco (1969), an inter-racial romance; The Howl (1970), a freewheeling pop cultural fantasy; and Dropout (also 1970) with the real-life lovers Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero. The couple also starred, with Corin Redgrave, in Vacation (1971), a mixture of medieval and modern fable.
Then, in 1972, the now controversial Deep Throat, the first pornographic picture to be shown in mainstream cinemas, where it made an estimated $600m, opened the way for Brass to abandon eclecticism and start a new career. “Out of the blue, one could get a big budget and sponsorship deals for explicit material. That helped me immensely,” he explained. “Salon Kitty would have otherwise never been made, at least not in that form.”
Salon Kitty, which starred Helmut Berger as a power-mad SS officer (a reference to Visconti’s The Damned, 1969), is a decadent tale in which young women are trained to entertain Nazi officers in a high-class brothel in Berlin in 1939. A mix of graphic sex, arty production design (by Ken Adam of James Bond films fame), and heavy political statements, the film was more honest than other nasty Nazi exploitation films it spawned.
“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.”
Ostensibly, Caligula was also about the depravity of excessive power, as conceived by Gore Vidal in his earlier screenplay, before the Penthouse magazine publisher Bob Guccione, who co-produced, decided that it did not plumb the depths demanded and added extra scenes (written and directed by Guccione) and recut others to provide more titillation.
As a result, Caligula, with a prestigious cast including Peter O’Toole, John Gielgud, Helen Mirren and Malcolm McDowell (in the title role), became nothing more than toga-dropping soft porn. Both Brass and Vidal demanded that their names be stricken from the credits. Ironically, it remains the film with which Brass is most associated.
In 2010, Brass announced that he was to “revisit an abandoned project about a Roman emperor that was ruined by Americans”, in 3D. That never came to pass, but in 2023 Caligula: The Ultimate Cut emerged. Running 178 minutes (just over 20 minutes longer than the original), it was pieced together by the art historian Thomas Negovan from 96 hours of raw footage. Gone was the Guccione material; Negovan instead used alternate takes from the archives to create a version of the film closer to Vidal’s original script.
Important elements were brought to the fore; Mirren, on screen for no more than 20 minutes as Caligula’s wife, Caesonia, in the 1979 cut, now had an hour of screen time, while the range and texture of McDowell’s performance was made newly vivid. “McDowell doesn’t exactly earn the audience’s sympathy,” said Variety magazine, “but the actor charts the young man’s path from ambitious successor to maniacal despot with much greater clarity and believability than ever before.”
Many reviewers expressed surprise at the partial and miraculous rehabilitation of this notorious folly. On its first release, Caligula had come in for a critical battering. The US critic Roger Ebert found it “sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash.
If it is not the worst film I have ever seen, that makes it all the more shameful. People with talent allowed themselves to participate in this travesty … Caligula is not good art, it is not good cinema, and it is not good porn.” Nevertheless, despite the negative reviews, the movie went on to make a lot of money and, inevitably, become a cult favourite, a status that Brass’s subsequent raunchy romps were not bad enough to achieve.
Among his classier and more restrained ones was The Key (1983), starring Stefania Sandrelli with Frank Finlay as her ageing husband. Set in Venice at the time of Mussolini’s rise to power, it had lush settings and a catchy Ennio Morricone score.
Miranda (1985) was the first of several erotic comedies that were on the frontier of hardcore. Based on a Carlo Goldoni play, it featured Serena Grandi as a tavern owner deciding which of three men she will settle down with. With titles such as Così Fan Tutte (All Ladies Do It, 1992), The Voyeur (1994), Frivolous Lola (1998), Cheeky (2000) and Black Angel (AKA Senso ’45, 2002), an updated remake of Visconti’s Senso (1954), Brass continued to find a specific, mostly male, audience.
Brass’s first wife, Carla Cipriani, a writer and assistant director, 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.
Tinto Brass (Giovanni Brass), film director, screenwriter and editor, born 26 March 1933; died 4 November 2026
