Les sorcières

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.