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The Wicked Imagination of History's Most Notorious Writer Has Made for Some of Skinema's Most Indelible Excursions Into Extreme Sex

Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.
—D.A.F. Sade

This year marks the 268th birthday of one of history's most notorious figures, the Divine Marquis, Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade.

The Marquis de Sade's name is synonymous with perversion and sexual abandon, although Sade's writings more than his life reflect an obsession with debauchery, excess, and violently erotic transgression.

Since not everyone is likely to find time to read his many novels, plays, and essays, Mr. Skin has compiled a list of essential viewing for the Sadean skinephile.

Eugenie... the Story of Her Journey Into Perversion (1970)

Jess Franco's adaptation of Sade's Eugenie de Franval moves the action from the 18th to the 20th century and stars Swedish sweetheart Marie Liljedahl (Picture-1-2) as the titular naif who gets corrupted spending a weekend with the older and worldlier Maria Rohm (Picture-1). Check out the redlit lesbo scene (Picture-1) between the two women—it's a skinstant classic!

Justine de Sade (1972)

Based on the story of Sade's impossibly put-upon but pluckily Pollyanna-ish heroine Justine, the oddly titled Justine de Sade features the naked talent of Alice Arno (Picture-1-2), who puts her rack, rump, and rug on display over and over again as she goes from one group of sadistic sex maniacs to the next, exemplifying Sade's subtitle for Justine, "The Misfortunes of Virtue."

Justine & Juliette (1975)

While Justine is constantly being abused by everyone whom she comes across without being corrupted herself, her separated-at-birth sister Juliette is corrupt and depraved from the start and is just as much a victimizer as Justine is a victim. This juxtaposition is the basis for the raunchy sex comedy Justine & Juliette starring, as the two sisters, Marie Forså (Picture-1) and Anne Bie Warburg (Picture-1-1), who share a fully nude outdoor lesbo love scene in the 1976 sex comedy Bel Ami (Picture-1). It may not be skin-cestuous, but it’s close enough!

Salo (1975)

When Sade died, he believed that the manuscript for his masterpiece 120 Days of Sodom, which he wrote on a long sheet of parchment and concealed in a crack in the wall of his prison cell, had been lost forever. But he was wrong, and the unfinished manuscript was eventually found and published in 1904. It went on to be the skin-spiration for Salo (Picture-1), the final film of famed Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini, completed before a teenage hustler murdered him by running Pasolini over with his own car. Sade's novel tells the story of a group of debauched nobles who hide themselves away in a country estate to indulge their increasingly violent lusts with a stable of male and female prostitutes. Pasolini sets the story during World War II and replaces Sade's nobles with fascists but leaves in all the violence and depraved sex (including coprophagia). Not for the faint of heart, Salo (Picture-1) is gross-out cinema whose gore gives Herschell Gordon Lewis a run for his money and whose skin will make you run for the Kleenex!

Sade held that, “in order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.” And for those not yet acquainted with vice, these skintillating cinematic treasures are a damned good place to start. But be warned, repeated viewing may cause you to indulge in another vice: the solitary one!