As Bruxas

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.

*** out of ****

This is basically a collection of five short films all about women and the roles that people feel that they play in society. It gives us different interpretations of women and how people feel around them.

The first story is about a famous actress who hides away from the public at a ski resort, before discovering that she's pregnant. But when she calls her husband, he is not at all supportive of her desire to have children. It starts out slow, but it becomes pretty haunting to watch after a while.

The second story gives us a woman who has an injured man in her car who is supposed to drive him to the hospital, but instead drives by several of them before going to where she wants to go. The man doesn't appear to be hurt too badly. Perhaps this is supposed to be a comment on how a woman supports a man in times of need?

The third story is an indescribably weird and chaotic satire of a father and son who look for a woman to be the father's wife and his son's mother. They come upon a woman who is deaf and are able to get something going with her before the story gets even weirder. This film actually really made me feel weird and left my mind broken in a million directions, but i couldn't stop watching it no matter how much i tired.

The forth is a story about a man who murders several people because of a woman. This one isn't really funny at all and is actually pretty depressing when you really get right down to it.

The fifth story has Clint Eastwood in it as the uninteresting husband of a woman who escapes into an imaginary world where she gets sweet revenge on him for being so boring.

My favorite story is the third, simply because it is so strange and unlike anything that it must be seen to be believed. Overall, i enjoyed it and found it to be very entertaining and interesting. It's creepy and weird if you aren't prepared. Check it out.

contains adult content and some violence.

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.

These five shorts have an undeniable breezy quality, commenting on the freewheeling Italian lifestyle of the swingin' sixties and also offering some timeless "period" storytelling. The favorite is "The Witch Burned Alive". Visconti's work is redolent of Fellini's "Juliet of the Spirits"' upper class shenanigans, with the celebrity angle making Woody Allen's comments nearly half a century later seem, well, tired and inferior. Silvana Mangano appears a bit, well, exhausted in this film and others of the series, like Chrisitna Applegate on a bad day, but the costuming and Kitzbuehl apres ski setting in a chalet make Visconti's short irresistible. The Pasolini work is charming in a semi-dada-esque way, especially with the knowledge that the young male pimply faced "actor' may well have been really a boy toy from the streets of Roma. The story has a punk rock feel that rings with folkloric quirkiness and white magic.

"Civic Spirit" is the most emblematic of the five, very au courant of the era, using an injured man as an excuse to barrel through Rome traffic at top speed under the guise of being hospital bound, while the driving beauty is really just using the poor hapless man as a shill to get to a rendezvous on time-- very cute, and Silvana looks fabulous once again, as she rushes to meet her playboy date. This film is on cable on occasion late at night and worth sitting through for the afficionado of these fine directors. Brava to Silvana, an actress largely forgotten in the pantheon of stars of international merit. Two pinkies held semi-high.