Rating: 
Summary: 'CRUEL CINEMA' .....apology to Antonin Artaud.
Review: "a plague, an all-engulfing experience" this is how Antonin Artaud describes Theatre of Cruelty, the concept explored and implemented by Peter Brook and his stellar cast, first on stage and in this newly restored film version of this radical work by Peter Weiss.It is not perfect though, WHY in mono when the 1965 vinyl recording is in stereo? This version would have been quite lovely IF we were slowly engulfed by the inmates [SURROUND SOUND], this is how the stage version works - we, the audience, watching the invited period audience, watching this "work", staged as "therapy" for fellow-inmates by deSade. An enormous acting challenge, but with this cast??? Please, this is manna! Glenda Jackson, the great Glenda Jackson startles with her presence, the somnambulist patient, playing Charlotte Corday, and do watch out for those beautiful unspoken moments with Magee [deSade], what communication! Magee as deSade ? Perfect, remember this man, equally brilliant in "Clockwork Orange", reduced to banal horror moves later. Ian Richardson, Marat [Gormenghast] also unforgettable. A period piece? Not really, playwright Peter Weiss writes more : "a drinking/thinking time". Explore the dialogue between deSade and Marat, it's quite contemporary, not forgetting the censor's occasional bon-mots! "These things couldn't possibly happen today, we live in civilized times", extremely funny, a "falling off one's couch" moment! The RSC went on to do "US" next [visions of Viet-Nam transplanted to merry old England] but the burning of butterflies [for real, there was the usual protest] at the work's conclusion proved to be a too extreme form of cruelty and awareness. "Quills" - worth seeing too - but a different reflection of deSade's brilliance, he knows how to observe, and DONT't miss the obscure and rarely obtainable "MARQUIS".
Rating: 
Summary: Shame on the DVD producers!
Review: Everything positive the other reviewers said about the performance recorded in this film is true. But the DVD product is a disgrace. The film is grossly grainy, bad even as pan-and-scan goes (there are actually scenes in which a conversation occurs between two people who are BOTH mostly off-screen because the frame occupies the space between), and generally a shameful engineering job. I'm torn between the politics of saying "buy it so that a piece of real art can be 'voted for' with dollars" and saying "don't support the trash-marketing of a lousy DVD version, wait for the Criterion version."
Rating: 
Summary: The Title of This Film
Review: For the record, the actual title of this film is: "The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade."
Rating: 
Summary: The Real Thing
Review: Forget the hype surrounding the adequate "Quills." Marat Sade is a great film, which ultimately not only blows Quills away, it sends it down the street, around the corner and into the dumpster. Marat Sade is a true masterpiece, superbly acted by the Royal Shakespeare Company, amazingly well set and cast, well directed and, above all, well written. Peter Weiss' amazingly provocative and subversive screenplay, which he adapted from his stage play, is a forum for a debate between de Sade and Jean-Paul Marat, one of the main instigators of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. Patrick Magee plays the Divine Marquis to perfection. Note this is not Patrick MacNee, the actor from the Avengers, rather this is the very well renowned British character actor who played the rich elderly victim/victimizer in "A Clockwork Orange". Ian Richardson is superb as Marat, and Glenda Jackson is amazing as a somnambulant who plays Charlotte Corday, Marat's assassin. Unlike Quills, which tries to bludgeon its one dimensional message into you, this play-within-a-film will make you use your brain, like it or not. Who is truly evil? Marat? De Sade? The liberal yet tyrannical post-revolutionary heirarchy? Everyone? No one? Does evil even exist? And while the actors in Quills are OK, they can't do much with the deep-as-a-comic-book charicatures written for them. Sorry Kate, you're really pretty and it was really nice of you to show us your breasts and all, but Quills comes in a far distant second to this cinematic tour-de-force. One word of caution: The version of Marat Sade that I have, which was released by I.S. Productions, Inc., is not letterboxed, and suffers because of it in several brief instances. Try to get a letterbox version. However, regardless of format, see this important film.
Rating:
Summary: The Real Thing
Review: Forget the hype surrounding the adequate "Quills." Marat Sade is a great film, which ultimately not only blows Quills away, it sends it down the street, around the corner and into the dumpster. Marat Sade is a true masterpiece, superbly acted by the Royal Shakespeare Company, amazingly well set and cast, well directed and, above all, well written. Peter Weiss' amazingly provocative and subversive screenplay, which he adapted from his stage play, is a forum for a debate between de Sade and Jean-Paul Marat, one of the main instigators of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. Patrick Magee plays the Divine Marquis to perfection. Note this is not Patrick MacNee, the actor from the Avengers, rather this is the very well renowned British character actor who played the rich elderly victim/victimizer in "A Clockwork Orange". Ian Richardson is superb as Marat, and Glenda Jackson is amazing as a somnambulant who plays Charlotte Corday, Marat's assassin. Unlike Quills, which tries to bludgeon its one dimensional message into you, this play-within-a-film will make you use your brain, like it or not. Who is truly evil? Marat? De Sade? The liberal yet tyrannical post-revolutionary heirarchy? Everyone? No one? Does evil even exist? And while the actors in Quills are OK, they can't do much with the deep-as-a-comic-book charicatures written for them. Sorry Kate, you're really pretty and it was really nice of you to show us your breasts and all, but Quills comes in a far distant second to this cinematic tour-de-force. One word of caution: The version of Marat Sade that I have, which was released by I.S. Productions, Inc., is not letterboxed, and suffers because of it in several brief instances. Try to get a letterbox version. However, regardless of format, see this important film.
Rating:
Summary: I agree completely with the last reviewer
Review: How often do you experience an artist's work and fell yourself truly changed? Not simply emotionally but philosophically and spiritually? This movie shook me up so much, I felt as though there'd been a violent revolution in my head. That sounds crazy--or perhaps pretentious--but it's true. The acting, set, and writing combine here to devastating effect. Watch at your own risk but I highly recommend this stunning work of art.
Rating:
Summary: A Classic of Epic Proportions!
Review: If you want to re-examine your most fundamental, most established beliefs, about the meaning of life and death, the significance of being, and of the ability of human beings to set in judgement over the lives and deaths of other human beings, this is the film you want to see. Virtually all other films I know of that are either about Marquis De Sade or the fine moral thread of the French Revolution verge on the comical or the sleazy and the whole subject of their writings gets obfuscated by emotive melodrama or the moral right. In short, no one approached these topics intellectually; that is, until this film (Marat-Sade). In summary, a brilliant movie, somewhat in the same vein as "A Clockwork Orange".
Rating:
Summary: More Spectacle than Substance.
Review: In 1808, at a mental institution in Charenton, outside of Paris, France, the patients perform a play for a visiting audience of the city's high society. The play was written and directed by the infamous Marquis de Sade (Patrick Magee), a long-term resident of the asylum known throughout the Western world for his scandalous philosophical novels. The play -and sometimes musical- is a reenactment of key events in France's tumultuous recent past. It dramatizes the French Revolution, its aftermath, and the eventual murder of revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat (Ian Richardson) by Charlotte Corday (Glenda Jackson) in 1793. Interspersed throughout the play are monologues by Marat and de Sade that articulate their conflicting socio-political ideologies. "Marat/Sade" is a movie of a play -indeed of a play within a play- that was performed by The Royal Shakespeare Company under the direction of Peter Brook in 1967. The play was originally written by playwright Peter Weiss and entitled "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", which is an accurate, if cumbersome, title. "Marat/ Sade" is a film of that play, and it is filmed in a style that draws attention to the fact that we are watching a play. To put it bluntly, it is filmed more awkwardly than well. The style of the play/movie reflects some of the experimental fashions in the art world of the late 1960s. The performances are interesting and heartfelt, but more melodramatic than convincing. The actors are playing performers who suffer from various mental ailments who are in turn playing roles in a play. -Kind of like playing two characters at once. The behavior of the asylum's histrionic inmates sometimes seems to coincide with their particular mental conditions and sometimes seems to be an acting class exercise in various extreme but unlikely emotional states. The chorus and minor players are generic crazies: ugly, outrageous, and pitiful, who seem to exist primarily to be just that. The most interesting aspect of the film is its philosophical monologues by Jean-Paul Marat and the Marquis de Sade. The antics of the mental patients trying to stage a proper full-length play and occasionally being overcome by their madness are funny, but ultimately most of the film just seems like clutter between the far more coherent monologues. Like most experimental theater, "Marat/Sade" is more about spectacle than about presenting a credible story or characters. The Marquis de Sade actually was an inmate at the Asylum at Charenton. And he did write plays which were performed by his fellow inmates for visiting Parisian aristocrats. But those plays have not survived. Whatever de Sade's plays at Charenton were about, they almost certainly had philosophical underpinnings. "Marat/Sade" showcases the conflicting ideologies of The Marquis de Sade and Jean-Paul Marat, but it doesn't do it very well. Philosophy also plays second fiddle to spectacle. The monologues are disjointed and none of the ideas are complete. The film toys with themes here and there, and then drops them. Only the idea that humans are violent savages if left unchecked is expressed coherently. Ultimately, "Marat/Sade" has the feeling of something that actors, writers, and directors like to create because it exercises their abilities, but that audiences don't like to watch because it isn't valuable beyond that. It's a movie made for performing, not for viewing. In a nutshell, this is 1960s experimental theater. It you like that, you'll probably like this. If you don't, you won't. The DVD (This refers to the Image Entertainment DVD only.): The disc has very poor sound, as if some dialogue simply wasn't miked. You'll have to turn the volume way up to hear some of the dialogue and then quickly back down so as not to be deafened. The sound badly needs to be remixed. This disc is full screen; the movie was filmed in a widescreen aspect ratio. Instead of compressing the wider image into a full screen ratio, the sides of the image have simply been chopped off. So you can't see what's going on in the periphery. There are no bonus features on the disc. Basically, this is a bad disc. Image Entertainment usually does better. But it looks like they're no longer producing it, so perhaps the MGM/UA disc is better.
Rating:
Summary: Great play, great acting, great director
Review: Just before the 1968 riots at the Chicago Democratic Presidential Nominating Convention, I was marching with a left wing protest group. We wound up singing the songs from Marat/Sade as we marched. Terrific dramatic power, great language, great acting.
Rating:
Summary: Demanding, Stimulating, But Of Limited Appeal
Review: MARAT/SADE is the film version of a play that arose from an actor's workshop exploring various theatrical theories expressed by French actor-director-writer Antoine Artard, who extolled a style of performance he described as "theatre of cruelty"--which, broadly speaking, consists of an assault upon the audience's senses by every means possible. Ultimately, and although it makes effective use of its setting and the cinematography mirrors the chaos expected of such a situation, the film version of MARAT/SADE is less a motion picture than a record of a justly famous stage play that offers a complex statement re man's savagery. The story of MARAT/SADE concerns the performance of a play by inmates of an early 1800s insane asylum, with script and direction by the infamous Marquis de Sade. (While this may sound a bit farfetched, it is based on fact: de Sade was known to have written plays for performance by inmates during his own incarceration in an asylum.) The story of the play concerns the assasination of the revolutionary Marat by Charotte Corday, but the play itself becomes a debate between various characters, all of which may be read as in someway intrinsically destructive and evil. Since all the characters are played by mentally-ill inmates of the asylum (the actor playing Marat, for example, is described as a paranoid, and the actress playing Corday suffers from sleeping sickness and meloncholia), the debate is further fueled by their insanity, unpredictability as performers, and the staff's reactions to both their behavior and the often subversive nature of the script they play out. Patrick Magee as de Sade, Glenda Jackson as the inmate playing Corday (it was her breakout performance), and Ian Richardson as the inmate playing Marat offering impressive performances; indeed, the ensemble cast as a whole is incredibly impressive, and they keep the extremely wordy script moving along with considerable interest. Even so, it will be obvious that the material works better as a live performance than as a film, and I do not recommend it to a casual viewer; its appeal will be largely limited to the literary and theatrical intelligentsia. The DVD includes the original theatrical trailer, but beyond this there are no extras of any kind.
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