De Sade

My friends and I should have known we were in trouble when the opening credits had that late-60s GoGo/orchestrated music and a James Bond-ish red dot with morphing black figures dancing around it. To give it some modicum of credit, it was so absurd and had such awful acting in the first 20 minutes that it showed some so-bad-it's-good promise. Sadly, the same scene replayed itself another 8 times through the movie, putting me, at least, to sleep. And the movie had nothing whatsoever to do with the Marquis de Sade. As my friend said after the movie, "It didn't work on so many levels."

2001 will never be the same.

An ambitious disaster that could only have come out of the sixties (just like "Doctor Faustus", "Casino Royale" and probably several others I have not seen). The filmmakers must have thought that "De Sade" failed because it was too "avant-garde" for its time. Wrong! It is too avant-garde for ANY time. It doesn't make any sense, you never learn anything about De Sade that you didn't already know before viewing it, and despite the bundles of nudity, there's barely a sexy moment to be found. (**)

American International Pictures rarely made dull movies. Their movies may have been junk food but they were very tasty. This was AIP's attempt at a thinking man's exploitation film. Lavish sets, Masterpiece Theater dialogue and an overall air of pretentiousness makes this film a real snooze. The fact that the film uses a fractured non-narrative structure makes the film even more pointless and boring. Only during the last 15 minutes does the film come to life as De Sade and his cohorts embark on an orgy of destruction and sex (rendered in hilariously psychedelic 60s fashion).

I haven't seen Clark Gable in the now-mythic PARNELL, but Keir

Dullea, surely recruited for his hotness in 2001, takes the cake in

this 1969 A.I.P. telling of the life of the great whippersnapper. The

idea of translating the agonies and ecstasies of Sade into drive-in

terms is mouth-watering, but, aside from a few Jess Franco

zooms into undulating backsides (shot through whorehouse-red

filters), you're stuck in snoozeville with an empty tank of gas.

Worse (or perhaps better?), Dullea manages to make every

eighteenth-century line sound like a college basketball player's

attempt not to cry in front of Coach.

Keir Dullea may be many things as an actor, but lewd and kinky don't immediately come to mind. Dullea is capable if oddly cast as the sadomasochistic Marquis de Sade, his storied life retold to him by his uncle, who presents our protagonist's journey as a play that he moves in and out of. "De Sade" shows some bold directorial touches for a film that had such a checkered history (Michael Reeves signed on to direct but died; Cy Endfield was brought on but suffered a breakdown, leading to uncredited fill-ins directed by original co-screenwriter Roger Corman to pad the running time). Originally X-rated, the movie has scenes of erotica (lots of naked breasts and bums--though not Dullea's), and yet the orgies are perhaps the film's weakest link. American-International Pictures suffered a financial loss when the results of "De Sade" failed to meet anyone's expectations. For his part, screenwriter Richard Matheson claimed his original script was just fine, it was Endfield's direction that loused everything up. *1/2 from ****