Nadie engaña a una mujer

A film made up of five short films of varying length. Not your average portmanteau enterprise though because there is no link between the various works except that they all star the producer Dino De Laurentiiis' wife, Silvana Mangano and all feature a witch, except they don't, 'b****' more like. A promotional reel of some ten minutes would give the impression of something quite wonderful because within this saga of just under two hours there are some fine shots and marvellously evocative visuals so evocative of the times. A roll call of the directors involved is also impressive, Visconti, Bolognini, Pasolini, Rossi and De Sica but the individual pieces and the overall effect of chucking them all together, not to mention the desperate attempts to get us to laugh, tend to make this a rather painful experience overall. Very much a part of the 'Commedia all'italiana' genre, loved in Italy and France but of nil impact in the UK it features two of the most famous comedians of the time, Toto and the aforementioned Mauro Bolognini. Toto appears in the most irritating but also most memorable segment, that of Pasolini, which is a black comedy saturated in primary colours. The closing section from Vittorio De Sica probably attracts the most attention today as it features a fledgling Clint Eastwood playing it both straight as a hen pecked husband and also as a comic book hero. I fear I may have made all this sound far too interesting when I found it so difficult, worth at least one watch, though, I guess.

I once caught 15 minutes on Italian tv of Pasolini's contribution and was completely fascinated by it. Having now also seen his film "Uccellacci e uccellini," made the same year as "Le Streghe" and in much the same absurdist style, I understand even more fully the political commentary being made in both films. The social and political commentary in Pasolini's work is delivered obliquely and with great humor but is nonetheless vital to an understanding of both the style and content of his films. Even after having lived in Italy for some time, speaking the language fluently and learning as much as I could about the complicated political events of the fifties, sixties and seventies, I am aware that as a foreigner I am still at a disadvantage to fully "getting" the point that's being made in these two films. I would think it would be nearly impossible to find them anything other than strange and disconnected without some familiarity with the Italian political milieu of that period. However, that said, I think the beauty of the stylization - successfully realized and united on every level, design, costumes, cinematography and most particularly, acting - works irregardless and is entertaining in and of itself. It's especially interesting to see a comic performer as beloved and mainstream as Toto was at that time, so willingly and completely giving himself over to a director as completely experimental and also so controversial in an extremely volatile political climate as was Pasolini. My only negative comment about "Le streghe" is that I wish it weren't so impossible to get hold of as I would love to see this very beautiful film in its entirety.

The best 25 minutes of Clint Eastwood's career lurk inside this uneven grab bag of shorts by five directors, among them greats. So good is he in Vittorio De Sica's brilliant segment (as the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit who unleashes his wife's libidinous Walter Middy) that you wonder what would have happened had Eastwood done more comedy. His gifts were wasted on spaghetti and spurs.

De Sica's imagination is the star here. The rest of the material is mildly charming, middling, dated, watchable only for Silvano Mangano, or, in the case of the Pasolini, dreadful.

Visconti's sketch is the best; he always did well in elegant surroundings and Mangano is at her best here. De Sica has Eastwood before he became a star and forgot how to act; it's a pretty good look at a marriage gone stale. The other three sketches are pretty much useless.

As a decent but not great anthology movie, some parts of The Witches were not very good. A couple of segments I forgot while they were still going, with #2 and #4 feeling particularly lazy, and kind of unfinished. Segment #1 wasn't as bad, but it was a little boring.

The Pasolini-directed segment came third, and that one made me laugh a couple of times. It was absurd and silly, and some side characters in it felt like they predicated Super Mario Bros.

But it's the Clint Eastwood segment - the final one - that I came to The Witches for, and it made the whole thing worth watching. They get him to do some ridiculous things in this, and I don't know how. There's something that verges on a fantasy/musical section and he just looks so awkward and grumpy; smiling through the pain. I feel like someone had dirt on him and blackmail might've been involved, but it was neat seeing him play someone very different from his usual stuff (and I'm not just saying that because he was dubbed into Italian, but that is like a whole other level of crazy).