Phonearl Good start, but then it gets ruined

Teringer An Exercise In Nonsense

Sexyloutak Absolutely the worst movie.

Portia Hilton Blistering performances.

James Turnbull This is one of a number of films that came out in the late 60s early 70s that challenged society at the time. Others I can think of include A Clockwork Orange, Women in Love and The Devils (the latter, almost impossible to get on DVD these days, but I have a copy!).I had not seen Marat/Sade for decades until my daughter (doing a degree in drama production) found her university making a production of it with she cast in the Glenda Jackson role. I managed to find a copy of the DVD and we watched it several times together. She was so blown away she nearly quit the part because of the perceived difficulty.This is not an easy production to watch and its intensity profound, its finale frightening. The acting, particularly Patrick Magee, is spell binding.Others have commented on plot and substance but in my mind they are secondary to the sheer brilliance of concept, screenplay, and execution. This is a production for theatre people. The casual viewer will be bored. But IMHO one of the great works of all time.

JasparLamarCrabb A brilliant, gruesome film by Peter Brook. The title says it all. De Sade (Patrick Magee) directs the inmates of the Charenton insane asylum in a play about Charlotte Corday's murder of the radical journalist Jean Paul Marat. The inmates are a hideous lot and Magee is no bargain either. He relishes the display before him while indicting the French bourgeoisie as true murder-loving maniacs. As he says, man takes pleasure in killing, otherwise he'd be a machine. Though the action takes place in one setting (the asylum's bathroom...Marat was in fact killed in his bathtub), director Brook keeps his camera moving and the film, though essentially a filmed stage play, takes on the feel of a fevered action movie. Magee is excellent and Ian Richardson is great as Marat. Glenda Jackson, as Charlotte, is exceptional in an early role.

Scarecrow-88 The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.The title pretty much sums up this powerfully visualized "play", set in 1808, during France's supposed success rate at educating the insane. This play by de Sade which is a scathing dissection of the French Revolution using Marat as the voice for the war as the Marquis takes the role against it. Morality obviously being this is a play from Marquis de Sade is also under the microscope as those that are insane fulfill certain roles under the celebrated masochist's direction. Monsieur Coulmier(Clifford Rose)is the mediator watching de Sade's behavior regarding what his script can and can not say. Blasphemy in this supposed golden age of France can not be warranted so Coulmier, with the assistance of nuns and guards inside, try to keep the deranged--and de Sade--in check.The play itself is told through not only the characters written on page, but from the insane themselves who often intervene on their own behalf. The ending is a fine slap in the face of the so-called success the French asylums seemed to have employed as the maniacs, after finishing, attack all the normal folk inside(two aristocratic women are audience members inside the cell--what were they thinking?)as Marquis relishes the chaos with glee.The staged film is disturbing, bleak, but profound and spellbinding. The way the camera moves throughout the cell(and several shots through the bars and on the darkened audience outside the cell)is hypnotic and deeply luridly fascinating. The cast is so good, they really convinced me I was watching a directed play using loonies!

onitsoga So I get off work late and I'm sitting in the big chair around 1:30 a.m., flipping around, looking for something to fill a half-hour gap until a rerun of the X-Files comes on. Next to me is my wife, passed out on the couch. Normally, I choose a benign History Channel doc on Hitler or something and my wife sleeps through it all until about 4 a.m. when her maternal instincts take over and we go to bed. But tonight was different. Tonight I came across this movie in the TV guide. Not only had I never heard of it, it was supposedly a four-star job. I did not think those last two things, in conjunction, could be possible, so I tuned in. Soon I'm manipulating the volume control -- louder during the quieter parts to try to make out what they're saying, or softer because my wife wakes up, shrieking, asking me what the hell I'm watching.I could not make heads or tails of it, and I'm a college grad-u-ate (albeit it from the Jethro Bodine School of Brain Surgery). The 'Glenda Jackson and the knife scene' made me edgy. The odd partial close-ups were a technique I never had seen before in cinema. The longish (in movie time) commentaries had me falling asleep. A couple of reviews here helped me understand what I was watching a lot more than any opinion I could conceive from having watched it that half hour. In conclusion, I know for sure only this: It's not a date movie. After a half hour, I switched to the X-Files, so it didn't enthrall me to any acceptable degree. However, during the half hour of viewing time, I kept hitting the summary button in order to write down the long, wacky name, in order to investigate further. But most telling was the fact that my wife went to bed without me -- for the first time in 12 years -- because it disturbed her in/out dream cycle to the point of pushing her over the edge.I can't recommend this movie. I also can't stop thinking about it.