150 Word Review: 'Marat/Sade' (1967)
The madness of crowds
Peter Brooks adapted his stage production of Peter Weiss' Marat/Sade into a 1967 movie with great skill and passion. This movie is a vivid, delirious critique of political power, which crushes the individual regardless of who wields it. Beware the ecstasy of mobs.
Marat/Sade is a play-within-a-play: The inmates of Charenton Asylum in 1808 Paris are allowed to perform a dramatic work about the murder of Jean-Paul Marat, one of the controversial heroes of the Reign of Terror, written by the Marquis de Sade, the legendary libertine whose violent and erotic fiction so offended France that he was imprisoned by both the monarchy and the republic. What is meant to be post-revolutionary propaganda degenerates into something terrible: the truth.
The ensemble is explosive, with Patrick Magee as calculating de Sade and a broken, fearsome Glenda Jackson as Marat's assassin, leading the cast to a climax that still disturbs.