Toby Dammit
Terence Stamp passed away this year, and the Criterion Channel has a tribute to him right now. His death called to mind what an incredible run he had in the 60s. He was pretty much to go to go of the Art cinema across the globe for several years. Toby Dammit is his best performance, and it also happens to be the best Federico Fellini film.
It was part of an omnibus horror film called Spirits of the Dead (1968), based on three short stories by Edgar Allen Poe, back when Poe adaptations were box-office gold (and made Vincent Price a star). The length restrictions of being 1 of 3 films in a triptych seems to have completely liberated Fellini from his worse impulses towards bloat. It is so far superior to the other two films (helmed by Roger Vadim and Louis Malle) that is has been separated from the omnibus itself and has had a healthy second life as a stand-alone film. (something similar happened with the omnibus film New York stories, many years later, where Martin Scorsese's Life Lessons made the other included shorts, by Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola, look like bad student films).
Stamp plays the end-of-his tether title character, a British actor in Italy to promote a film, a ghostly presence stumbling in a drunken haze around a decadent Fellini-esque backdrop of glad-handers, glamour queens and industry ghouls. He has made a deal with a Producer that in exchange for services rendered, he will receive a new Ferrari, and intends to take it for a ride to escape. It is a ride through Rome that leads to dead-end alleys. It is a thrilling sequence that indicates Fellini may have been perfectly at home directing an Italo-gangster potboiler like his peers Sergio Sollima or Enzo G. Castellari.
The metaphor, ever present, is that the deal for the Ferrari, nay, his entire career, is a deal with the Devil (the title of the Poe short story upon with Dammit is based is "Never Bet the Devil Your Head"). The "Devil" appears here, a leering little girl as perhaps only Fellini could imagine the Devil. After escaping the dead-end streets and tunnels, Dammit is finally able to break free in his Ferrari for an exhilarating moment of freedom, until he comes to an ominous bridge and the Devil gets her due.
Don't miss Toby Dammit or any of the other Stamp films on the Criterion Channel, if you have it. And why don't you have it (they offer free trials. Go!)?
