Tinto Brass: The Auteur Who Got Away With It, Mostly

A career that began with Godard's Paris and ended with softcore Venetian romps — with a ruined Roman epic in between. Brass was more serious than his reputation, and less serious than he wanted to be.

Tinto Brass arrived at cinema through one of the more improbable routes available to an Italian of his generation: law degrees from Padua and Ferrara, an apprenticeship with Henri Langlois at the Cinémathèque Française, and an assistant directorship under Roberto Rossellini. He knew the pantheon personally before he made anything. When his debut feature, To the Ends of the Earth (1963), was shelved by censors over its anti-Catholicism — Brass refused to cut it — the arc of a career that would always collide with institutional resistance was already established. The 1960s work is the hardest to reconcile with the reputation. The Swinging London phase — Deadly Sweet (1967), Nerosubianco (1969), The Howl (1970), Dropout (1970) — produced four films that tracked the psychedelic moment with the associative freedom of a filmmaker who had actually read Godard rather than merely imitated him. Dropout starred the real-life couple Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero. These were films with cultural ambitions, not commercial calculations. Then Deep Throat happened. The 1972 release demonstrated that explicit material could achieve mainstream distribution and industrial returns — an estimated $600 million — and Brass, with characteristic bluntness, acknowledged the structural opportunity: big budgets and sponsorship for content that would otherwise never get financed. Salon Kitty (1976) was the result. Set in a Berlin brothel in 1939, with Helmut Berger as a power-drunk SS officer and Ken Adam (the James Bond production designer) on sets, it was more politically serious than the exploitation cycle it preceded, though that cycle also traded on its existence. Caligula (1979) is the film everyone knows, and not through any fault of Brass's. Gore Vidal wrote the screenplay; Peter O'Toole, John Gielgud, Helen Mirren, and Malcolm McDowell agreed to perform in it. Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione co-produced, then rewrote scenes, shot additional footage himself, and recut the film to maximize titillation. Both Brass and Vidal demanded their names removed. What remained was, by Roger Ebert's accounting, 'sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash' — which did not stop it from making a lot of money and becoming a cult object, the two outcomes that most reliably outlive critical judgment. The rehabilitation came slowly and incompletely. In 2023, art historian Thomas Negovan assembled Caligula: The Ultimate Cut from 96 hours of raw footage, removing the Guccione material and restoring approximately an hour of Helen Mirren's Caesonia — a character reduced to under 20 minutes in the 1979 release. Variety found that McDowell's performance now 'charts the young man's path from ambitious successor to maniacal despot with much greater clarity and believability than ever before.' What the Ultimate Cut demonstrates is that the 1979 version was a film destroyed from within by its financier, not a film that failed on its own terms. The later career — The Key (1983), Miranda (1985), Così Fan Tutte (1992), The Voyeur (1994), Frivolous Lola (1998), Cheeky (2000), Black Angel (2002) — found a specific audience and served it reliably. These are erotic comedies on the border of hardcore, Venetian in setting and Goldoni in some of their sources, with Ennio Morricone occasionally on the score. They are exactly what they are. Brass did not pretend otherwise, and neither should criticism. He died on 4 November 2026, aged 93, survived by his son Bonifacio, daughter Beatrice, and second wife Caterina Varzi. The honest obituary holds two things simultaneously: Brass was a filmmaker of genuine intelligence and wide cultural formation who made some very good films that almost no one has seen, and he was also a filmmaker who made a career producing softcore erotica for a predominantly male audience. Both are true. The interesting question — the one his career poses to anyone who takes auteur theory seriously — is what happens when a filmmaker's authentic sensibility and his commercial genre point in the same direction.