Criterion is releasing one of cinema’s most controversial films in director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Sodom, or The 120 Days of Sodom. The 1975 film is an adaptation of a Marquis de Sade story. The film is set in the Republic of Salò, the Fascist-occupied portion of Italy in 1944, with four segments loosely parallel to Dante’s Inferno: the Anteinferno, the Circle of Manias, the Circle of Shit, and the Circle of Blood.

Four men of power, the Duke, the Bishop, the Magistrate, and the President, agree to marry each other’s daughters as the first step in a debauched ritual. With the aid of several collaborator young men, they kidnap eighteen young men and women (nine of each sex), and take them to a palace near Marzabotto. Accompanying them are four middle-aged prostitutes, also collaborators, whose function in the debauchery will be to recount erotically arousing stories for the men of power,...