Nadie engaña a una mujer

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.

Surreal, absurdist (kind of), very Italian, very 60s. You should definitely see this movie if you like a) 60's clothes, b) 60's movie sets, c) weird movies, d) Silvana Mangano, and e) obscure Clint Eastwood titles (yes, he's in it, too), among other things.

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).

Italian-French co-production from Dino De Laurentiis is a hit-and-miss (mostly miss) quintet of female portraits from five different directors, each featuring Silvana Mangano in the lead. As Gloria in the lengthy opener from director Luchino Visconti, Mangano is an Italian movie star who is less than the sum of her parts. In the amusing second story from Mauro Bolognini, she's a "Lady in a Hurry" who uses an accident victim as a way to get through afternoon traffic, while in Pier Paolo Pasolini's wonderfully odd third episode, Mangano plays a deaf-mute picked to be the wife of an eccentric widower and his son (all with cartoony hair). This section of the movie is the highlight, and almost makes the rest of it worth-seeing (although the star is terrific in all five stories). Mod Italian cinema--distributed Stateside in a dubbed print by Lopert Pictures--is more arty than incisive, though it does feature a young Clint Eastwood in the final tale from Vittorio De Sica, looking somewhat uncomfortable while dancing down a runway. ** from ****

This one's a big-named Dog. The last segment, with Mangano and Clint Eastwood, is at least interesting, if only for a look at baby Clint, but ultimately goes nowhere. Big style, substance missing in action. Trivia note: in the first segment, filmed in Kitzbuhel, Austria, one of the press photogs is a Kitzbuhel local who was a ski instructor at the time, according to my husband who lived in Kitzbuhel around the same period. Yawn. I kept hoping something profound would happen. Hope was dashed. The Italians have a perfect word for this: Stupidagine!