While Spirits of the Dead doesn’t do much justice to Poe’s source material, fans of bizarre French cinema should have a pretty good time.
Spirits of the Dead (1969)
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Reviews Counted:16
Fresh:14
Rotten:2
Average Rating:6.5/10
Runtime: 2 hrs 1 min
Genre: Foreign Films
Synopsis: With SPIRITS OF THE DEAD, three titans of European cinema--Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, and Federico Fellini--team up for a stylish film based on the works of macabre author Edgar Allan Poe. Vadim... With SPIRITS OF THE DEAD, three titans of European cinema--Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, and Federico Fellini--team up for a stylish film based on the works of macabre author Edgar Allan Poe. Vadim directs the first segment, METZENGERSTEIN, with Jane Fonda portraying the spoiled, vicious Frederique. When she finally meets her neighbor, Baron Wilhelm (played by her brother Peter), her advances toward him are met with rejection. Humiliated, she takes matters into her own hands, leading her into a downward spiral with a tragic ending. Malle takes the middle slot with WILLIAM WILSON, featuring Alain Delon as the troubled hero, a man who has been haunted since childhood by a man with his exact name. After torturing a gorgeous woman (Brigitte Bardot), a final duel brings William's ghosts home once and for all. Last but not least is Fellini's segment, a story set in the 1970s entitled TOBY DAMMIT, which stars Terence Stamp as a spacey English actor who travels to Rome in order to play Christ in a New Testament Western. When he gets the keys to a brand-new Ferrari, he embarks on a dangerous drive that just might cost him his life. SPIRITS OF THE DEAD is a real gem for those who enjoy the surreal and grotesque. [More]
Starring: Brigitte Bardot, Jane Fonda, Terence Stamp, Peter Fonda
Starring: Brigitte Bardot, Jane Fonda, Terence Stamp, Peter Fonda, Alain Delon
Director: Federico Fellini, Louis Malle, Roger Vadim
Director: Federico Fellini, Louis Malle, Roger Vadim
Story: Edgar Allan Poe
Composer: Nino Rota
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Reviews for Spirits of the Dead
It offers pleasures above and beyond its status as a relic of a groovier and exponentially more swinging era.
Episode 3, however -- this is the one people talk about when they talk about Spirits of the Dead. Federico Fellini's 'Toby Dammit' stars Terence Stamp in a piece that's a Fellini film festival in miniature.
See it for Fellini's hilarious "Toby Dammit" sequence. (Elsewhere Jane and Peter Fonda play lovers...)
Not what I would have expected... but hey, we are defined by our contradictions, no?
As far as psychological horror goes, the films work well, and that they realize Poe’s stories were mainly internalized distortions of the world works to their advantage, even as they approach the material in vastly different ways.
[Toby Dammit] 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.
None of the three European director's stories catches the macabre flavor of Poe.
more of an interesting exercise in literary adaptation than a fully satisfying work of art
Only Fellini (Toby Dammit) really manages to make much of his source.
If the other two stories had also been done by Fellini, the whole offering might have been much better.
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