Spirits of the Dead (1968) is a trilogy of short films "liberally adapted" (as the titles to one of the episodes tells us) from three short stories by Edgar Alan Poe. By the time the movie was made Roger Corman and American International, with the help of Vincent Price, had already made movies based on Poe's most famous short stories. The Europeans who made Spirits of the Dead were left with the dregs of Poe's oeuvre -- his first, uncharacteristically Teutonic, tale "Metzengerstein", "William Wilson" (the best Poe story in this collection), and a decidedly minor work, "Toby Dammit -- or Never bet the Devil your Head". One should note that the European Poe differs from America's version of that writer -- and, perhaps, these stories have more critical traction in Paris and Rome than in Los Angeles. Two of the stories, "Metzengerstein" and "William Wilson" are mostly just excuses for soft-core European porn, exploitation flicks with lurid imagery presented in a peculiarly understated and tasteful style. Federico Fellini's unbelievably garish "Toby Dammit" is astonishing on all levels.
Roger Vadim directs "Metzengerstein". An evil baroness (Jane Fonda) tyrannizes her people and spends her evenings spooning with gorgeous lesbians and their depraved boyfriends. The baroness traipses around in garments that have to be seen to be believed, generally form-fitting lingerie with long translucent, silk capes. Sometimes, she wears Sci-Fi fantasy garb -- much of the film (shot by Claude Renoir of all people) looks like a warm-up for Barbarella -- for instance, a mahogany-colored corset that seems painted onto her pointy breasts. The baroness tries to seduce her cousin, played by Peter Fonda as a character far more conventionally feminine than the (anti-) heroine. (He has a cute pet owl). When he rejects her, she burns his stables to incinerate his beloved horses. The hapless object of the baroness' affections dies in the blaze but seems to be reincarnated as a huge black stallion. The baroness falls in love with the stallion, enjoying picturesque rides in the surf on the scenic Brittany sea-shore. Sometimes, she entertains the big horse by playing her lute. A fire has destroyed a tapestry in the baroness' orgy room, now in disuse because she spends all her time frolicking with the horse. A ascetic-looking weaver restores the tapestry and gives the big black horse on the wall-hanging red eyes. "Why?" someone asks. "Red as flame," the weaver says. Clearly, the baroness' romance with the horse is ill-fated. Lightning sets the countryside on fire and the horse, carrying Jane Fonda, dives into the flames, apparently immolating them both. The movie is unintentionally funny -- in one scene, Jane Fonda rides her horse to an atmospheric, ruinous castle on the rocky sea-coast. Her retainers there greet her by hanging some poor bastard. As Jane Fonda approaches the misty ruined castle, the wide-screen shot is framed to show her on horseback with some courtiers and the hanged man dangling immediately to her right on the screen. "I just love this place," the Baroness says in a cheery voice ignoring the corpse about four feet from her. This episode is awful, but it's not unwatchable -- in fact, it's fun in perverse way. (Jane Fonda looks great in her tight corsets and legs bare to her crotch and there's a spectacularly beautiful Brittany castle, Kerouzere,featured in a number of exteriors.)
Louis Malle's "William Wilson" cleaves fairly closely to Poe's Doppelgaenger story. The film has a complicated structure involving flash-forwards and flashbacks, but it's generally clear. The titular character is a vicious bully who is stalked by a kind and virtuous double. When the evil William Wilson does something awful, the kind William Wilson tries to undo the bad deed. The movie is atmospherically shot in old barracks. moldering fortresses and a town dominated by cathedral with a fateful campanile filmed like the Mission bell tower in Vertigo. Mostly, the picture is an excuse for showing naked girls. After inventively torturing a schoolmate with a barrel full of rats, Wilson goes to medical school. We get to see a cadaver sliced open in close up and, then, applying the lessons of the day to his evening debauchery, Wilson captures a girl, ties her stark naked to the dissecting table, and threatens to vivisect her for the amusement of his equally vicious classmates. The good William Wilson arrives and tries to save the girl but she gets sliced open anyway. These antics get Wilson expelled from medical school and he joins the Austrian army. One night, he runs into a beautiful woman (Brigitte Bardot as brunette, chomping on cigars). They duel in an all-night poker game and, by cheating, Wilson finally beats her. Of course, the last wager involved the woman betting herself. Having lost the game, Wilson (Alain Delon) strips her to the waist and starts flogging her with a willow switch for his amusement and the delectation of his buddies. He, then, proposes that one of his buddies rape the woman. The good Wilson appears at this point and exposes that his double was cheating. (The military officers are all appalled that Wilson cheated and cast him out of their company in disgrace; it never occurred to them to accuse him of dishonor when he flogs the woman or proposes her rape.) Bad Wilson and good Wilson duel and good Wilson gets gutted. After confessing to a priest (so that the film can be structured mostly as a flashback), bad Wilson flings himself off the church tower and ends up merging with good Wilson who is still clutching the dagger stuck in his belly. The movie is okay but Louis Malle has "phoned in" the direction -- it's obvious that he has almost no interest in the material. There are a few good shots, but the production is generally lackluster.
Fellini's "Toby Dammit" is a frenetic dose of sheer, adrenaline-soaked hysteria. (With its bravura camera-work, alarming color scheme, and sweat-drenched performance by Terence Stamp, the movie resembles in tone George Miller's little vignette in The Twilight Zone featuring the man tormented by goblins who are tearing his passenger jet apart as it blasts through a turbulent thunderstorm.) The film begins with a cockpit scenes in an airplane descending to land at Rome -- orange filters and dark color-scheme (faces flare up like flames) make it seem like the plane is landing in Hell. The airport terminal is similarly terrifying, filled with grotesque figures and hectoring announcers on black-and-white TVs. Stamp is delirious with booze and drugs and he sees a little girl in white with a white ball -- she represents Satan to him. (Fellini stole this indelible image from Mario Bava -- in turn, Scorsese stole the image and used it in his Last Temptation of Christ.) Toby Dammit (Stamp) has been hired to act in a "Catholic Western" showing Christ's redemption as performed "on the prairies." He rides in a limousine with smarmy priests and, then, finds himself ensnared in an infernal Roman traffic jam -- similar to the traffic jam in 8 1/2 and a precursor to the visionary traffic sequences in Fellini's Roma. Somehow, Stamp ends up at the Italian version of the Oscars (people receive a statue of a "golden She-wolf"). More ghastly faces loom in the darkness and voluptuous women strut around while other girls in white and dressed like caryatids stand as a silent chorus on stage. Stamp's character mutters some insults and, then, runs away from the ceremony (it seems to be occurring in some kind of cistern). He hops in a yellow Ferrari and zooms around town. But it's nightmare village with narrow lanes and innumerable dead-ends. At last, he tries to escape the place by jumping his car over a gap in a shattered bridge. There's a wire strung across the bridge decking and, although the Ferrari successfully makes the leap, the hero's head doesn't. (Again Scorsese steals from this film -- a slow dolly up to the wire stained with blood from the decapitation is quoted exactly in Raging Bull: Jake LaMotta has just take a terrible beating but will not go down -- the camera tracks forward to show the blood stained rope to which he was clinging.) Fellini's super-charged segment is full of disorienting and shocking close-ups, bizarre hellish landscapes, and a jumbled sound track that sounds like a Robert Altman dialogue scene on methamphetamine. (At one point, we hear Ray Charles crooning "Ruby".) The film is a tremendous accomplishment on all levels and Terence Stamp, playing a despicable character, seems almost sympathetic by the end of his torments. There's too much in the movie, an avalanche of ideas and images, but the film is, certainly, startling and a reminder of Fellini's pictorial genius.
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