Marat/Sade (1967)

MARAT/SADE  (1967)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Peter Brook
    Patrick Magee, Ian Richardson, Glenda Jackson,
    Freddie Jones, Clifford Rose, Hugh Sullivan
Full title: "The Assassination and Persecution of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis De Sade". A movie released in 1967, based on a Royal Shakespeare Company production first staged in 1965, about a play being performed in 1808, looking back to the events of 1789. It's flamboyantly theatrical, a raucous celebration of anarchy in which arguments about war and peace, religion and revolution, tyranny and freedom, censorship, madness, income inequality and everything else are articulated, debunked, skewered, shat on and blown to smithereens. Ian Richardson as Marat looks exactly  like that famous painting of Marat's death in 1793, while Patrick Magee looks and acts like Marlon Brando in "Superman" (and this was ten years before Brando did "Superman".) The ending is total bedlam, which under the circumstances makes perfect sense.