Marquis de Sade: Justine, Italian title Justine ovvero le disavventure della virtù (“Justine, or the misadventures of virtue”), also released as Deadly Sanctuary, is a 1969 erotic costume picture. Jesús “Jess” Franco directed. Harry Alan Towers wrote and produced. It is an Italian and West German co-production, adapted from the Marquis de Sade’s 1791 novel Justine. The story is set in eighteenth-century France. The locations were mostly around Barcelona, including the Palau Nacional and Montjuïc Castle, using Spanish ground as a lavish stand-in for the ancien régime. It was Franco’s biggest budget to that point, still under one million dollars.
The central clash is casting against the book. Franco wanted Rosemary Dexter as Justine, for a sharper Sadean edge. Hollywood money forced Romina Power into the lead. She was inexperienced, and her screen image was softer. The script was rewritten around her. Franco later said the changes diluted the moral inversion of the novel, virtue punished and vice rewarded. The film still keeps the Sadean machine in which an innocent is punished for crimes she did not commit. For adult viewers this is costume exploitation about branding, captivity, flagellation, and a dungeon, not a consent workshop and not a faithful reading of the book.
From the convent to the dungeon
In late-eighteenth-century Paris, orphaned sisters Justine and Juliette are thrown out of their convent when their father dies, taking the last of his gold. Juliette steers Justine to the brothel keeper Madame de Buisson, who wants prostitution in exchange for a bed. Justine refuses and leaves. Juliette stays, and with the prostitute Claudine kills Madame de Buisson and a client, then flees with the gold. Justine accepts free lodging from Du Harpin on condition she work as a maid. Du Harpin’s master forces himself on her. After she escapes, Du Harpin still tells her to steal the man’s gold amulet. She refuses. While she sleeps, Du Harpin hides the amulet among her things. The police find it and jail her. In prison she meets Madame Dubois, a fierce convict headed for execution, who pulls her into a breakout. They hide in a forest and Dubois takes her into the band. Men in the gang try to rape her. She flees and collapses near the house of the painter Raymond. He uses her as a model. They fall in love, until the police hunt her again.
Justine then becomes attendant to the Marquise de Bressac. The Marquis orders her to kill the Marquise or be framed. The Marquise tries to poison him. He tricks the Marquise into drinking the wine and kills her. As punishment he brands the letter “M,” for murderess, onto Justine’s breast. The film treats the brand as a plot scar and as erotic spectacle. At a château, four men living as meditating ascetics offer sanctuary. Justine learns that their “philosophy” is sexual deviance and that the other female “servants” are sex slaves. She is chained and tortured in the dungeon. Father Antonin tells her that pleasure is the endurance of suffering, and she agrees. He plans to “release” her by killing her in a torture ritual. The ceremony collapses into chaos and she escapes. Raymond finds her unconscious on the road and takes her into a city. Madame Dubois seizes her for a nude stage show. The brand on her breast causes an uproar. As the police drag her away, Juliette, now mistress to a royal minister, claims her, calls her own wicked life empty, and says virtue will be repaid. At the end Justine and Raymond walk off. The quiet coda softens Sade’s colder ledger for a commercial audience.
Fetish surface and the production
Adult viewers who know BDSM will not find a technical lesson in sadism. They will find costume-exploitation atmosphere: the brand, captivity, flagellation, chains in a dungeon. Justine stays the picture of innocence while she is punished. Franco’s camera is more interested in mood and in fetish detail than in a strict logic of cruelty. Beside Power, the cast includes Maria Rohm as Juliette, Klaus Kinski, and Akim Tamiroff, a large international company. The film was shot in English and later dubbed into Italian and German, a multilingual package aimed at markets outside one country.
Release, cuts, and the two-star notice
It opened in Italy in April 1969 and in West Germany in June 1969. American International Pictures handled North America. Censors produced several running times, from about 90 minutes to about 120, a familiar fate for late-1960s erotic films. Robert Firsching at AllMovie gave it two stars and called it an uneven adaptation, with more parable than perversion, like Tom Jones with full-frontal nudity added. On home video, Anchor Bay and Blue Underground each issued a DVD between 2003 and 2004, including interviews with Franco and Towers, which let cult viewers look at the film again. Casting politics and the censors kept the picture from the novel’s undiluted cruelty. What remains is lavish costume spectacle.
