Spirits of the Dead

Histoires extraordinaires
Directed by	Federico Fellini (segment "Toby Dammit") Louis Malle (segment "William Wilson") Roger Vadim (segment "Metzengerstein")
Written by	Edgar Allan Poe (stories) Roger Vadim & Pascal Cousin (adaptation, "Metzengerstein") Louis Malle & Clement Biddle Wood (adaptation, "William Wilson") Federico Fellini & Bernardino Zapponi (adaptation, "Toby Dammit") Daniel Boulanger (dialogue, "William Wilson" and "Metzengerstein")
Produced by	Raymond Eger
Starring	Jane Fonda Terence Stamp Brigitte Bardot Peter Fonda Alain Delon
Narrated by	Vincent Price (English language version)
Cinematography	Tonino Delli Colli ("William Wilson") Claude Renoir ("Metzengerstein") Giuseppe Rotunno ("Toby Dammit")
Edited by	Franco Arcalli & Suzanne Baron ("William Wilson") Ruggero Mastroianni ("Toby Dammit") Hélène Plemiannikov ("Metzengerstein")
Music by	Diego Masson ("William Wilson") Jean Prodromidès ("Metzengerstein") Nino Rota ("Toby Dammit")
Distributed by	Cocinor (France) American International Pictures (US)
Release dates	17 May 1968 (Cannes Film Festival) 23 July 1969 (US)
Running time	121 min
Country	France/Italy
Language	French/English

Histoires extraordinaires (1968) dubbed Spirits of the Dead for English and Tre Passi Nel Delirio for Italian, is an "omnibus" film comprising three segments. The French title Histoires extraordinaires (translated to English as Extraordinary Stories) is from the first collection of Poe's short stories translated by French poet Charles Baudelaire; the English title Spirits of the Dead is from an 1827 poem by Poe.

American International Pictures distributed this horror anthology film featuring three stories by Edgar Allan Poe directed by European directors Roger Vadim, Louis Malle and Federico Fellini. Jane Fonda, Alain Delon, Peter Fonda, Brigitte Bardot, and Terence Stamp are among the stars. The English language version features narration by Vincent Price.

The film received a mixed critical reception, with the Fellini segment widely regarded as the best of the three. Reviewing the picture under its English language title Spirits of the Dead, Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that "Toby Dammit, the first new Fellini to be seen here since Juliet of the Spirits in 1965, is marvelous: a short movie but a major one. The Vadim is as overdecorated and shrill as a drag ball, but still quite fun, and the Malle, based on one of Poe's best stories, is simply tedious."

In 2008, Toby Dammit was separately restored under the personal supervision of its renowned cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno. A new 35mm print was screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it was widely acclaimed by the press as a lost Fellini masterpiece.

Stories

All three segments are based on stories written by Edgar Allan Poe. The original stories were "Metzengerstein", "William Wilson" and "Never Bet the Devil Your Head".

"Metzengerstein" segment

At the age of 22, Countess Federica inherits the Metzengerstein estate and lives a life of promiscuity and debauchery. While in the forest, her leg is caught in a trap and she is freed by her neighbor Baron Wilhelm, whom she has never met because of a long-standing family feud. She becomes enamored with Wilhelm, but he rejects her for her wicked ways. His rejection infuriates Federica and she sets his stables on fire—Wilhelm is killed attempting to save his prized horses.

One black horse somehow escapes and makes its way to the Metzengerstein castle. The horse is very wild and Federica takes it upon herself to tame it. She notices at one point that a damaged tapestry depicts a horse eerily similar to the one that she has just taken in. Become obsessed with it, she orders its repair. During a thunderstorm, Federica is carried off by the spooked horse into a fire caused by lightning that has struck.

"William Wilson" segment

During the 19th century, northern Italy is occupied by Austrian forces. A man named William Wilson rushes to confess to a priest (in a church of the "Città alta" of Bergamo) that he has committed murder. Wilson then relates the story of his cruel ways throughout his life. While playing cards, his doppelgänger, also named William Wilson, convinces people that Wilson has cheated at cards. In a rage, the protagonist Wilson stabs the other. After making his confession, Wilson commits suicide by jumping from the tower of "Palazzo della Ragione" but finally seen with a sword stuck in his chest.

"Toby Dammit" segment

Former Shakespearean actor Toby Dammit is losing his acting career to alcoholism. He agrees to work on a film, to be shot in Rome, for which he will be paid with a Ferrari. After helping a little girl find her lost ball, Dammit begins to have unexpected visions of the girl and the ball. After being given his Ferrari at a movie awards ceremony, Dammit, drunk, races around the city in his new car. Workers try to get Dammit to stop at a collapsed bridge across a ravine, but Dammit, intoxicated by a vision of the little girl (whom he has earlier identified, in a TV interview, as his idea of the Devil) chooses to make a suicidal attempt to drive across the ravine. Whether or not his car reaches the other side, Dammit has been decapitated by a thick wire that was stretched before the ravine on the other side. The Fellini segment features music of Nino Rota and "Ruby" by Ray Charles, and is 37 minutes long.

Cast

• Brigitte Bardot - Giuseppina
• Alain Delon - William Wilson/The Double
• Jane Fonda - Countess Frederique de Metzengerstein
• Terrence Stamp - Toby Dammit
• James Robertson Justice - Countess's Advisor
• Salvo Randone - Priest
• Francoise Prevost - Friend of Countess
• Peter Fonda - Baron Wilhelm Berliftizing
• Philippe Lemaire - Philippe
• Katia Christine - Young girl

Production

Roger Vadim's segment was filmed just after Vadim had completed shooting on his previous movie Barbarella, which also starred Jane Fonda. Scriptwriter and novelist Terry Southern, who had worked on the screenplay for Barbarella, travelled to Rome with Vadim and according to Southern's biographer Lee Hill, it was during the making of this segment that Peter Fonda told Southern of his idea to make a 'modern Western' movie. Southern was enthusiastic about the idea and agreed to work on the project, which eventually became the renowned independent film Easy Rider.

Louis Malle accepted the job of directing the segment “William Wilson” in order to raise money for his next film Le Souffle au coeur (Murmur of the Heart). The financial process of raising money for Murmur took him three years after completing “William Wilson” and in the meantime he shot two documentaries about India. Malle stated that he did not consider his collaboration in Histoires Extraordinaires a very personal one and that he agreed to make some compromises with the producer, Raymond Eger, in order to make the film more attractive to mainstream spectators. Malle’s original conception of the film was closer to Poe’s tale than the final result. The most important changes were: casting Brigitte Bardot in the role of Giuseppina with the purpose of adding some erotic touches to the film, the inclusion of the dissection scene, and a somewhat explicit use of violence in some scenes.

The Fellini segment, which shares so little with its source in Poe that it could almost be considered an original piece, is notable for its visual and thematic similarities to three earlier Fellini masterworks. The disintegrating protagonist and the hellish celebrity demimonde he inhabits are reminiscent of both La Dolce Vita and 8½, while the interweaving of dreams and hallucinations into the plotline and the use of highly artificial art direction to reflect inner states resemble similar techniques used in 8½ and Juliet of the Spirits. Fellini rejected Poe's version of the devil, a lame old gentleman with his hair parted in front like a girl’s, and cast a 22 yr old Russian woman (Marina Yaru) to a play the devil as a young girl. Lending a "pedophiliac slant" to Toby's character, Fellini explained that "a man with a black cape and a beard was the wrong kind of devil for a drugged, hipped actor. His devil must be his own immaturity, hence, a child".

Toby Dammit was something of a comeback attempt for Fellini, whose stab at a science fiction film, The Voyage of G. Mastorna, had collapsed in preproduction in 1966 owing to combined creative and health crises, leaving the director deeply in debt to producer Dino De Laurentiis. With Fellini's consent, De Laurentiis sold the note to producer Alberto Grimaldi, Fellini's collaborator here. Toby Dammit is also notable as Fellini's first collaboration with the cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, who would photograph seven of the eleven remaining feature films in the Fellini oeuvre.

In June 1967, the press announced that Orson Welles would direct one segment based on both "Masque of the Red Death" and "The Cask of Amontillado". Welles withdrew in September 1967 and was replaced by Fellini. The script, written in English by Welles and Oja Kodar, is in the Filmmuseum München collection.

Release

Samuel Z. Arkoff offered the producers $200,000 for American International Pictures to have the US and Canadian rights, but was knocked back as Arkoff wanted to cut a scene from the Fellini sequence. A year later the producers had not been able to find another buyer so when Arkoff made the same offer they took it.

External links

• Histoires extraordinaires at IMDb
• Histoires Extraordinaires at AllMovie