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European appreciation of Poe goes back to Baudelaire, three dedicated libertine-auteurs give it a go. An amorphous Ovidian doodle, Roger Vadim's Metzengerstein is blessed with a full-bodied sense of gratuitousness and Jane Fonda in Renaissance-fair cape and Swinging '60s boots. The capricious countess is "a pretty Caligula" drifting through orgies, her closeted yearning for wholeness is revealed when the one man she covets (Peter Fonda) is reincarnated as an untamed black stallion. The vixen in the trap, "une logique fatale," a flaming finish. An echo of Les Cousins for Louis Malle's William Wilson, also Les Enfants Terribles in the schoolyard hellion who grows up into Alain Delon at his cruelest. The Austrian officer is an icy sadist ("We will remove despair and the pain of love... along with the heart," he says while approaching the bound victim with a scalpel), the cigar-puffing gambling lady (Brigitte Bardot) challenges him but the true nemesis is the conscience as pesky doppelgänger. If Vadim's linchpin image is the tapestry left unfinished and Malle's is a Rorschach blot in scarlet ink, Federico Fellini's in Toby Dammit rests on Terence Stamp's lingering glance of jet-lagged dissolution. The airport landing is an arrival in Mars and the limousine ride is a coffin on wheels, thus the whirl of the Hip British Superstar in Cinecittà. The project is "the first Catholic Western" (Fra Angelico plus Fred Zinnemann, per the production), the inferno of celebrity is a procession of inane interviews and awards shows with the promise of a resplendent Ferrari at the end. "What is amiss in your life, Mr. Dammit?" A masterclass in decadent razzle-dazzle leads to the speed demon roaring through a labyrinth of Roman cul-de-sacs, the ode to Dreyer (They Caught the Ferry) modulates to quite the Bavaesque stinger, the grinning moppet has a new bouncy plaything. Cinematography by Claude Renoir, Tonino Delli Colli, and Giuseppe Rotunno.
--- Fernando F. Croce |