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yendiSpirits of the Dead. 1968. Directed by Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, and Federico Fellini. Written by Vadim, Malle, Fellini, Pascal Cousin, Clement Biddle Wood, Daniel Boulanger, and Bernadando Zapponi. Based on stories by Edgar Allan Poe. Originally released by American International Pictures (albeit in a dubbed format).
Anthology films, a staple of horror movies, are by their very nature hit-or-miss. Even when all the segments of a movie are handled by one director, the different plotlines, actors, and even writers can lead to a wildly inconsistent movie (Cat’s Eye comes immediately to mind). Throw a group of different directors together, however, and you’re just begging for something to go wrong (see New York Stories).
But what if you make an anthology featuring three of the best-known European directors of the mid-20th Century? And what if all three short films were adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories? And what if the anthology was filmed during the ‘60s, right in the midst of the sexual revolution?
Why, then you’d have Spirits of the Dead (or, if you prefer, Histoires Extraordinaires). Alas, you also still end up with a mixed bag.
The opening act of this anthology is “Metzengerstein,” adapted by Roger Vadim. Vadim, of course, is best known for And God Created Women, an utterly beautiful and erotic movie*. Here, he approaches similar themes of female sexuality, only with decidedly mixed results.
Baroness Metzengerstein (played by Vadim’s then-wife Jane Fonda) is a woman living a life of debauchery. She hosts orgies, she kills people, she pretty much does what any hedonistic aristocrat would do. And when she meets another aristocrat, played by Peter Fonda, she naturally must have him.
I need to pause for a moment to indulge my bourgeois and out-of-date Western mores:
Casting a brother and sister as lovers is eight kinds of icky.
Back to the story, Female Fonda is ultimately rejected by Male Fonda, so she does what anyone would do, and burns down his stables. Alas, he dies in the fire, too. And comes back as a horse. We learn most of this via the narration, as neither character really does much on screen. The horse haunts Jane Fonda and drives her mad until she eventually dies from being in a Roger Vadim movie (or, for those following the action on screen, when she and the horse she rode in on ride off into a fire).
Vadim was a one- or two-trick pony, and easily the weakest of the directors involved in this movie. It doesn’t help that Jane Fonda had five good performances in her (this not being one of them), and Peter Fonda had only one (Ulee’s Gold)**. If you’re short on time, this chunk of the anthology can be skipped entirely.
The second episode, “William Wilson,” is directed by the late, great Louis Malle. I can’t imagine that any of you are unfamiliar with Malle, who made wonderful movies both in Europe (Les Amants, which is not only fantastic, but which inspired Potter Stewart’s famous definition of obscenity***) and in the US (Pretty Baby, Damage, Vanya on 42nd Street). It’s also (arguably) the most famous of the three Poe tales used for this movie.
Wilson’s tale is told in flashback, as he confesses to his priest the sins of his life. Wilson is a sadist who excels at manipulating those around him into helping with his schemes. As a child, he and some of his classmates immerse another little boy in a pit of rats, but eventually, another boy named William Wilson (one who doesn’t want to torture kids with rats) shows up, and the protagonist no longer feels comfortable as the head bully..
Flash forward to medical school, where Wilson (the bad one) decides that working on corpses isn’t enough. He kidnaps a young woman and ties her to the examination table, and then performs various acts of surgery on her (to the amusement of the other students, who never seem to be held as accountable for their acts of evil as Wilson is). When she dies on the table, he realizes he screwed up, and joins the army.
Wilson spends a few years being all that he can be, and is made an officer (if not a gentleman). He eventually encounters Brigitte Bardot at a bar, and after some back and forth over cards, he beats her by cheating. Naturally, he takes his winnings in the form of, well, whipping her.
It’s at this point that Wilson’s doppelganger shows up, and exposes the original as the scum he is. Naturally, they end up dueling, and evil Wilson kills his better half, thus damning himself in the process.
Malle does a much better job of crafting a solid tale. It helps, of course, to have a talented lead (in the form of Alain Delon), but Malle is also much more aware of the meaning behind the story he’s telling. This tale of a man’s internal id/super-ego struggle externalized is complex, but never confusing to follow. It’s not brilliant – the doppleganger story is so common that it’s lost some of its novelty – but it’s still a solid story.
The final third of this movie is “Toby Dammit,” directed by Federico Fellini (and based loosely on “Don't Wager Your Head to the Devil”), and it's nothing short of brilliant. Alas, it’s harder to summarize, as much of this segment is visual and surreal. Plus, I don’t snark at Fellini****.
Terrence Stamp plays Toby, a world-renowned actor off to Italy to play Jesus in a western. His world is soaked in drugs, sex, and booze. He’s borderline insane from the outset, seeing a creepy little girl*****, freaking out at the paparazzi, and cracking up in a TV interview. He’s like the unholy lovechild of Vincent Gallo and Mel Gibson (although Stamp makes him much more sympathetic -- he's the only one of the protagonists in this anthology for whom I found any sympathy).
The surreal landscape presented by Fellini includes an awards show from Hell******, bizarre fashion runways, and a drunken drive into the dark night that leads to the end of the title character’s life.
Fellini makes use of the surreal in many of his movies (and folks with a much better background in film theory than yours truly have written about it), but “Toby Dammit,” (which was Fellini’s first film after Juliet of the Spirits), has some of his most finely crafted moments (none moreso than the little satanic girl).
It’s worth seeing this anthology just for Fellini’s closing segment, but Malle’s portion is certainly worthwhile. It’s as inconsistent as any anthology ever filmed, but the good here is more than worth it, and in the DVD age, there’s no need to worry about Vadim’s mediocre opening segment.
*I am, of course, referring to the original version of this movie, featuring Brigitte Bardot; the Vadim-helmed American remake (featuring Rebecca de Mornay), is decent enough, but not nearly as visually stunning.
**Yes, I loved Easy Rider, too. But Fonda’s acting isn’t the reason it’s a great movie.
***”I’ll know it when I see it.”
****I also don’t tug on Superman’s cape.
*****Wonderfully referenced in Kim Newman’s Judgement of Tears.
******Yeah, I know.
Anthology films, a staple of horror movies, are by their very nature hit-or-miss. Even when all the segments of a movie are handled by one director, the different plotlines, actors, and even writers can lead to a wildly inconsistent movie (Cat’s Eye comes immediately to mind). Throw a group of different directors together, however, and you’re just begging for something to go wrong (see New York Stories).
But what if you make an anthology featuring three of the best-known European directors of the mid-20th Century? And what if all three short films were adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories? And what if the anthology was filmed during the ‘60s, right in the midst of the sexual revolution?
Why, then you’d have Spirits of the Dead (or, if you prefer, Histoires Extraordinaires). Alas, you also still end up with a mixed bag.
The opening act of this anthology is “Metzengerstein,” adapted by Roger Vadim. Vadim, of course, is best known for And God Created Women, an utterly beautiful and erotic movie*. Here, he approaches similar themes of female sexuality, only with decidedly mixed results.
Baroness Metzengerstein (played by Vadim’s then-wife Jane Fonda) is a woman living a life of debauchery. She hosts orgies, she kills people, she pretty much does what any hedonistic aristocrat would do. And when she meets another aristocrat, played by Peter Fonda, she naturally must have him.
I need to pause for a moment to indulge my bourgeois and out-of-date Western mores:
Casting a brother and sister as lovers is eight kinds of icky.
Back to the story, Female Fonda is ultimately rejected by Male Fonda, so she does what anyone would do, and burns down his stables. Alas, he dies in the fire, too. And comes back as a horse. We learn most of this via the narration, as neither character really does much on screen. The horse haunts Jane Fonda and drives her mad until she eventually dies from being in a Roger Vadim movie (or, for those following the action on screen, when she and the horse she rode in on ride off into a fire).
Vadim was a one- or two-trick pony, and easily the weakest of the directors involved in this movie. It doesn’t help that Jane Fonda had five good performances in her (this not being one of them), and Peter Fonda had only one (Ulee’s Gold)**. If you’re short on time, this chunk of the anthology can be skipped entirely.
The second episode, “William Wilson,” is directed by the late, great Louis Malle. I can’t imagine that any of you are unfamiliar with Malle, who made wonderful movies both in Europe (Les Amants, which is not only fantastic, but which inspired Potter Stewart’s famous definition of obscenity***) and in the US (Pretty Baby, Damage, Vanya on 42nd Street). It’s also (arguably) the most famous of the three Poe tales used for this movie.
Wilson’s tale is told in flashback, as he confesses to his priest the sins of his life. Wilson is a sadist who excels at manipulating those around him into helping with his schemes. As a child, he and some of his classmates immerse another little boy in a pit of rats, but eventually, another boy named William Wilson (one who doesn’t want to torture kids with rats) shows up, and the protagonist no longer feels comfortable as the head bully..
Flash forward to medical school, where Wilson (the bad one) decides that working on corpses isn’t enough. He kidnaps a young woman and ties her to the examination table, and then performs various acts of surgery on her (to the amusement of the other students, who never seem to be held as accountable for their acts of evil as Wilson is). When she dies on the table, he realizes he screwed up, and joins the army.
Wilson spends a few years being all that he can be, and is made an officer (if not a gentleman). He eventually encounters Brigitte Bardot at a bar, and after some back and forth over cards, he beats her by cheating. Naturally, he takes his winnings in the form of, well, whipping her.
It’s at this point that Wilson’s doppelganger shows up, and exposes the original as the scum he is. Naturally, they end up dueling, and evil Wilson kills his better half, thus damning himself in the process.
Malle does a much better job of crafting a solid tale. It helps, of course, to have a talented lead (in the form of Alain Delon), but Malle is also much more aware of the meaning behind the story he’s telling. This tale of a man’s internal id/super-ego struggle externalized is complex, but never confusing to follow. It’s not brilliant – the doppleganger story is so common that it’s lost some of its novelty – but it’s still a solid story.
The final third of this movie is “Toby Dammit,” directed by Federico Fellini (and based loosely on “Don't Wager Your Head to the Devil”), and it's nothing short of brilliant. Alas, it’s harder to summarize, as much of this segment is visual and surreal. Plus, I don’t snark at Fellini****.
Terrence Stamp plays Toby, a world-renowned actor off to Italy to play Jesus in a western. His world is soaked in drugs, sex, and booze. He’s borderline insane from the outset, seeing a creepy little girl*****, freaking out at the paparazzi, and cracking up in a TV interview. He’s like the unholy lovechild of Vincent Gallo and Mel Gibson (although Stamp makes him much more sympathetic -- he's the only one of the protagonists in this anthology for whom I found any sympathy).
The surreal landscape presented by Fellini includes an awards show from Hell******, bizarre fashion runways, and a drunken drive into the dark night that leads to the end of the title character’s life.
Fellini makes use of the surreal in many of his movies (and folks with a much better background in film theory than yours truly have written about it), but “Toby Dammit,” (which was Fellini’s first film after Juliet of the Spirits), has some of his most finely crafted moments (none moreso than the little satanic girl).
It’s worth seeing this anthology just for Fellini’s closing segment, but Malle’s portion is certainly worthwhile. It’s as inconsistent as any anthology ever filmed, but the good here is more than worth it, and in the DVD age, there’s no need to worry about Vadim’s mediocre opening segment.
*I am, of course, referring to the original version of this movie, featuring Brigitte Bardot; the Vadim-helmed American remake (featuring Rebecca de Mornay), is decent enough, but not nearly as visually stunning.
**Yes, I loved Easy Rider, too. But Fonda’s acting isn’t the reason it’s a great movie.
***”I’ll know it when I see it.”
****I also don’t tug on Superman’s cape.
*****Wonderfully referenced in Kim Newman’s Judgement of Tears.
******Yeah, I know.
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-12 12:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-12 07:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-12 07:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-12 02:47 am (UTC)But you know what? Someone -- it might even have been Roger Ebert, who's certainly a moral person -- said something like "I know it sounds awful, but you know who could have great chemistry as lovers in a film? John and Joan Cusack."
I also don’t tug on Superman’s cape.
Heh. Heh, I say.
But was it Peter David or one of his colleagues who said it'd be no big deal to tug on Superman's cape, but it'd be Batman's cape you'd not want to pull? ;-)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-12 07:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-12 06:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-12 07:06 pm (UTC)