"William Wilson", directed by Louis Malle, with Alain Delon as the titular hero and his own double, is really pretty good. Delon gets to whip the proud Bridget Bardot, which is going a little too far, although heaven knows she deserves a good licking. The tone of the story is suitably elegant and ironic. The men wear carefully tailored generic uniforms with cream-colored jackets. William Wilson is a naughty boy. He deceives people, breaks hearts, cheats at cards. BUT -- he can't seem to get away with any of it because whenever he pulls one of his stunts, a masked figure calling himself William Wilson shows up and exposes him for the fraud he is. Wilson finally kills his Doppelganger and then himself. It's one of my favorite Poe stories because it's different. Most stories of doubles from this period materialize Freud's "id", the savage part of our minds that we try so desperately to suppress. Examples range from Mr. Hyde to Professor Moriarty. Pure evil. But this double represent Freud's "superego," the conscience. Nicely done.
The last segment was directed by Federico Fellini with photography by Giuseppe Rotunno and score by Nino Rota. I mention this because these two craftsmen make the story unmistakably Fellini's. I don't think the director could have done it without them.
It's based (very loosely) on Poe's "Never Bet The Devil Your Head." Terence Stamp is the internationally famous movie star, Toby Dammit, and arrives in Rome to accept one of those awards like the Palm D'Or or the Oscar. The Rome into which Stamp descends is an hallucinatory vision of hell, beginning with the slightly insane and thoroughly claret-colored airport. What follows is a hilarious parody of an awards ceremony. While a drunken Stamp waits his turn, one after another phony is paraded onto the stage under the blazing lights, striding through studio fog, accompanied by a joyous ruckus. There is a group called The Three Angels From Hell that collectively receive one of these awards. Asked to say a few words, each follows the other and blankly mouths the same appreciation: "I'm very moved by this. All I can say is 'Thank you'." They project the believability of some guy behind the supermarket check-out counter who says, "Have a nice day."
I ought to mention, before describing more of the story, that the focus isn't entirely on the awards ceremony. Stamp has to be interviewed on a TV program first, for instance, and -- throughout -- there are all sorts of inexplicable and bizarre goings on. At the interview, a carefully groomed and very beautiful woman steps before the camera and lauds the interviewee. Then she slowly and deliberately drops to her knees, still grinning, puts her nose on the floor and crawls away. Is she deranged? Is the director irretrievably mad? No! It's just her way of taking herself off camera and crawling out of the way so that the interview can get started. Other whimsical events and shots take place, too many to mention.
At any rate, Terence Stamp is so liquified at the awards ceremony he can only stagger to the stage. It's been suggested to him that he recite something from Shakespeare, "the most famous poet in the world -- second only to our Dante." But keep it short. Short Shakespeare. We don't want to bore the audience. Stamp's face is a ghastly death mask of agony as he begins some well-known lines from "MacBeth" but he quits, tells the audience and the staff what they can do to themselves, stumbles outside, gets into his Ferrari and speeds away.
The story slows down considerably despite the Ferrari's speed and the reckless laughter of the drunken maniac behind its wheel. Stamp finds himself spinning around in empty shabby neighborhoods full of dead ends, with stuffed dummies representing chefs and flocks of sheep scattered about, as in a "Twilight Zone" episode.
At the end, he encounters a bridge with a gap in the middle of it. On the other side of the gap is the devil in the guise of a pretty little blond girl. He senses that the devil is challenging him to speed the car across the gap. He should not have accepted the challenge.
Roger Vadim's colorful "Metzengerstein" is from a story I haven't read, but the plot can be summed up easily enough. Juliet, in all her noble nubility, falls in love with Romeo but accidentally kills him half-way through, upon which he turns into a horse. Juliet senses his presence in the horse and rides him constantly, finally to their joint destiny. (What is it with women and horses anyway?) The viewer will be surprised to find out that in Medieval France the half-naked girls wore gaudy costumes not unlike those of Las Vegas showgirls. I didn't mind it. I didn't mind Jane Fonda's determined debaucheries either. Except those gang bangs were disgusting. What do those dumb page boys or whatever they are have that I don't have? What puts the ape in apricot? Fonda speaks French in this one. I was able to follow most of it because she speaks with such a marked American accent, as if she'd learned French at Vassar, the same French I learned in high school.
The last segment was directed by Federico Fellini with photography by Giuseppe Rotunno and score by Nino Rota. I mention this because these two craftsmen make the story unmistakably Fellini's. I don't think the director could have done it without them.
It's based (very loosely) on Poe's "Never Bet The Devil Your Head." Terence Stamp is the internationally famous movie star, Toby Dammit, and arrives in Rome to accept one of those awards like the Palm D'Or or the Oscar. The Rome into which Stamp descends is an hallucinatory vision of hell, beginning with the slightly insane and thoroughly claret-colored airport. What follows is a hilarious parody of an awards ceremony. While a drunken Stamp waits his turn, one after another phony is paraded onto the stage under the blazing lights, striding through studio fog, accompanied by a joyous ruckus. There is a group called The Three Angels From Hell that collectively receive one of these awards. Asked to say a few words, each follows the other and blankly mouths the same appreciation: "I'm very moved by this. All I can say is 'Thank you'." They project the believability of some guy behind the supermarket check-out counter who says, "Have a nice day."
I ought to mention, before describing more of the story, that the focus isn't entirely on the awards ceremony. Stamp has to be interviewed on a TV program first, for instance, and -- throughout -- there are all sorts of inexplicable and bizarre goings on. At the interview, a carefully groomed and very beautiful woman steps before the camera and lauds the interviewee. Then she slowly and deliberately drops to her knees, still grinning, puts her nose on the floor and crawls away. Is she deranged? Is the director irretrievably mad? No! It's just her way of taking herself off camera and crawling out of the way so that the interview can get started. Other whimsical events and shots take place, too many to mention.
At any rate, Terence Stamp is so liquified at the awards ceremony he can only stagger to the stage. It's been suggested to him that he recite something from Shakespeare, "the most famous poet in the world -- second only to our Dante." But keep it short. Short Shakespeare. We don't want to bore the audience. Stamp's face is a ghastly death mask of agony as he begins some well-known lines from "MacBeth" but he quits, tells the audience and the staff what they can do to themselves, stumbles outside, gets into his Ferrari and speeds away.
The story slows down considerably despite the Ferrari's speed and the reckless laughter of the drunken maniac behind its wheel. Stamp finds himself spinning around in empty shabby neighborhoods full of dead ends, with stuffed dummies representing chefs and flocks of sheep scattered about, as in a "Twilight Zone" episode.
At the end, he encounters a bridge with a gap in the middle of it. On the other side of the gap is the devil in the guise of a pretty little blond girl. He senses that the devil is challenging him to speed the car across the gap. He should not have accepted the challenge.
Roger Vadim's colorful "Metzengerstein" is from a story I haven't read, but the plot can be summed up easily enough. Juliet, in all her noble nubility, falls in love with Romeo but accidentally kills him half-way through, upon which he turns into a horse. Juliet senses his presence in the horse and rides him constantly, finally to their joint destiny. (What is it with women and horses anyway?) The viewer will be surprised to find out that in Medieval France the half-naked girls wore gaudy costumes not unlike those of Las Vegas showgirls. I didn't mind it. I didn't mind Jane Fonda's determined debaucheries either. Except those gang bangs were disgusting. What do those dumb page boys or whatever they are have that I don't have? What puts the ape in apricot? Fonda speaks French in this one. I was able to follow most of it because she speaks with such a marked American accent, as if she'd learned French at Vassar, the same French I learned in high school.