The Witches consists of five short films featuring Mangano. Luchino Visconti's The Witch Burned Alive shows Mangano as Gloria, an actress taking refuge at a mountain resort. Besieged by papparazzi, inflaming the men to passion and the women to jealousy, Gloria's exile drives her to despair. Mauro Bolognini's Civic Responsibility depicts a selfish woman driving an injured man (Alfredo Rosi) to a hospital. The Earth as Seen from the Moon is a fairy tale by Pier Paolo Pasolini, with widower Ciancicato (Toto) and son Baciu (Ninetto Davoli) pursuing their ideal woman - the deaf-mute Absurda Yelp. The Sicilian shows an unfaithful Sicilian wife triggering a blood feud. Finally there's An Evening Like the Others, where housewife Giovanna fantasizes about cheating on her milquetoast husband Carlo (Clint Eastwood).
The Witches advances from a singularly macho conceit: women (specifically Mangano) always cause trouble. The Witch Burned Alive explores this at greatest length: the hotel women relish in stripping Gloria's makeup and wig; a jealous rival (Annie Garadot) seduces a young waiter (Helmut Berger) to prove her womanhood. But the selfishness of Civic Responsibility and The Sicilian's protagonists registers, along with Giovanna's shrewishness. The ideal woman, of course, is Absurda, unable to communicate or hear anything. Baggage aside, how do the stories stack up?
Visconti's story is long, stiff and ponderous without appropriate payoff. Auteurists may recall Bellisima's excoriation of stardom, while Gloria's catatonic exit presages Ingrid Thulin's final scenes in The Damned. But the material's just to thin to match Visconti's pretensions. Bolognini's and Rossi's shorter entries just sort of sit there. Civic Responsibility is an unfunny gag stretched out interminably; The Sicilian resorts to crude jokes about shotgun murders and shrieking widows. Somewhere the filmmakers forgot to add humor.
Nonetheless, Witches gets two lovely chapters. The Earth as Seen From the Moon is a mini-masterpeice. Stars Toto and Ninetto Davoli previously collaborated on Pasolini's The Hawks and the Sparrows (1966), a similarly broad comedy. With absurd hairstyles, exaggerated gestures, fast motion and goofy sight gags (flirting with a mannequin!), they effectively update comedia dell'arte for the '60s. Mangano matches them with an hysterical pantomime performance, down to a delightfully absurd demise. It's strange yet endearingly whimsical, without the off-putting tawdriness of Pasolini's later work.
De Sica's An Evening Like the Others plays like Brief Encounter re-imagined by Fellini. De Sica contrasts Giovanna's dour marriage with her absurd fantasies of sex and violence. She alternately flirts with superheroes Diabolik and Batman, shoots Carlo while wearing a Barbarella costume, or stripteases in a stadium of drooling admirers. Eastwood sends up his image, sporting Man With No Name garb and asking Giovanna if she wants to see A Fistful of Dollars! Mangano comes off best here, eschewing vanity to play an unattractive, unappealing woman.
The Witches is an odd patchwork film, alternately brilliant and lousy. (I haven't even mentioned the Terry Gilliam-style credits animation.) If nothing else, it's an eclectic monument to Dino De Laurentiis's hubris: five of Italy's most talented filmmakers, collaborating on a silly vanity project/sketch comedy. The mind would boggle if this weren't the man who later gave us Orca.
