Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom

Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom

1975. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Paolo Bonacelli, Giorgio Cataldi, Uberto Paolo Quintavalle. Salò “derives its powerful impact largely from its literalness: staging the tortures of de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom point by point, detail by detail, even though Pasolini enforces a kind of shotgun marriage between this novel and a relatively recent historical phenomenon by situating all his simulated atrocities in the last stronghold of Italian Fascism.... Like it or not, Salò is a realized work that accomplishes a good deal of what it sets out to do—to appall us with the spectacle of our own worst capacities, and to confront us with the even more disturbing and conflicted responses that this may elicit in us” (Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Soho Village News, June 4, 1980). In Italian; English subtitles. 114 min.