Watch 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 For Free

Very Cool!!!

Good movie but grossly overrated

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

This movie is about a play the inmates of a Charenton lunatics asylum are supposed to perform in 1808, under the direction of the former marquis De Sade, one of them. The main character is Marat, a nobody, who became one of the most blood thirsty leaders of the French Revolution. He was himself murdered by Charlotte Corday, a young woman from Caen in Normandy, who was supposedly a descendant of the great Corneille, who wrote "Le Cid", probably the most famous of French tragedies of the Golden Age. This is filmed theater, not very interesting, and even rather boring. But one has to acknowledge that Glenda Jackson's performance is stunning. She probably never was a pretty woman, just average, and now, as she grew older, she's quite ugly. But she had that flame in her eyes...

I just watched the MGM DVD, which is a fine letterboxed transfer. (I also saw the movie a few years after it was released.)Marat/Sade is an amazingly original and stunningly powerful philosophical and psychological descent into one of the most complex periods of recorded history, the French Revolution, the Terror that ensued, and the rise of Napoleon and his empire. The multi-layered ideas come thick and fast; I had to watch the movie over two nights because there's so much to think about, and some of the words and images are so overwhelming.Of the Royal Shakespeare Company actors in the film (little known at the time), Glenda Jackson had the most notable subsequent career, but Ian Richardson (Marat) has also done remarkable things (and he's so young here, you may not recognize him).This is not a movie for casual entertainment, but if you care about history and the deepest questions of good and evil and free will, you'll find much of value here.

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 far-fetched, 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 assassination 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 some way 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 melancholia), 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.Gary F. Taylor, aka GFT, Amazon Reviewer

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.