The most cryptic credits on any movie ever. The dismissed director, Tinto Brass, is credited only with Principal Photography (not to be confused with Director of Photography), while the final Editing is attributed to an impersonal Kafkaesque entity identified as "the production." The script is proclaimed to be Adapted from an Original Screenplay by Gore Vidal, although adapted by whom is left a mystery. Vidal, whose name originally was meant to be a part of the movie's title, as in Jacqueline Susann's Once Is Not Enough, reportedly wanted his name taken off the movie altogether. But he, a vocal adversary of the director bias in film criticism, at least ought to be happy, quite apart from his two-hundred-grand paycheck, to be associated with a movie that completely obliterates the director credit. It is hard to imagine anyone else on this project finding much to be happy about. The idiotic hope underlying the thing was that the periodic doses of hardcore sex and sadistic violence would sufficiently enliven a dull history lesson on Pagan Rome, or alternatively that the dull history lesson would somehow dignify the sex and violence. With Malcolm McDowell, Teresa Ann Savoy, Helen Mirren, Peter O'Toole, and John Gielgud. (1979) — Duncan Shepherd