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“I am always displeased by circumstances for which I cannot
account. Mysteries force a man to think, and so injure his
health.”–Edgar Allan Poe, “Never Bet the Devil Your Head”
DIRECTED BY: Federico Fellini
FEATURING: Terence Stamp
PLOT: Toby Dammit, a once famous actor whose career is in jeopardy because of alcoholism, accepts a role in a “Catholic Western” to be shot in Italy, on condition that he be given a Ferrari. Drinking throughout the evening of his arrival in Rome and increasingly incoherent, Dammit bumbles his way through a television interview and an appearance as guest speaker at an awards ceremony. Finally, he jumps into the sports car and races through the deserted streets of Rome, but becomes lost in an increasingly unreal city.
BACKGROUND:
- “Toby Dammit” was originally filmed as an entry in Spirits of the Dead, an anthology based on Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories. Louis Malle‘s version of “William Wilson” and Roger Vadim‘s “Metzengerstein” were the other entries. “Dammit” is inspired by Poe’s “Never Bet the Devil Your Head,” an unusually comic outing for the macabre author, but takes almost nothing from the short story’s plot.
- Terence Stamp traveled to Italy to make this film with Fellini, and stayed for several years afterwards. His very next film project was the lead role as the mysterious seductive stranger in Pasolini‘s Teorema.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: In Poe’s story, the Devil was an old man, but Fellini chose to recast Old Scratch as a young girl (the actress was actually 22, but appears much younger). Fellini said he felt that Toby’s personal devil should represent his own immaturity. Fellini again demonstrates his genius with faces, as the pallid, mysteriously grinning girl is as devilish and chilling as waifs come.
TWO WEIRD THINGS: Bouncy-ball escalator game; waxwork chef run down by sports car
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Fellini and Poe are an unexpected combination, but the Italian director takes to the American writer’s gloominess like a libertine takes to laudanum. Fellini’s carnivalesque portraiture easily bends towards the ghastly. The director never tried his hand at another outright horror movie, but “Dammit” makes you wonder what might have been.
Trailer for Spirits of the Dead (1968) with “Toby Dammit” clips
COMMENTS: “Toby Dammit” is an interstitial work which Fellini made in the break between 1965’s Juliet of the Spirits and 1969’s Fellini Satyricon. It is anything but minor or dashed-off, however; the director puts as much care into this 45-minute anthology entry as into any of his features, working with his usual collaborators (including another sparkling jazzy score from Nino Rota) and casting the up-and-coming star Terence Stamp as an on-the-decline actor. The shorter format proved no challenge for Fellini, who simply stuffed a feature-length amount of ideas into less than half his usual runtime, making for a compressed experience that distills the essence of his style. 45-minute Fellini is, it turns out, very good Fellini.
In some ways “Toby Dammit” can be seen as a horrific alternative retelling of the final sequence of La Dolce Vita, in which the protagonist’s exasperated ennui comes to a head (so to speak) rather than ending in existential ambiguity. Fellini even throws in a confrontational scene with the paparazzi, along with an amusingly glib and combative TV interview (in which Toby claims the thing he hates most is “his public”) and a glitzy but vapid and absurd film awards ceremony staged before a giant man-made pond. Toby seems to pick up the arc right where Marcello left off after his sweet life soured; no longer in a downward spiral of debauchery, the actor is right at death’s door. Fellini shoots the matinee-pretty Stamp as disheveled, unshaven, pasty, and glowing with a sheen of sweat; still handsome, in a rakish way, but clearly unwell. His fast decline begins with a presentiment of doom: he imagines the Rome airport as a spider drawing him into its web. It proceeds as he attempts to burn his bridges in the film community, insulting journalists and embarrassing himself with a slovenly, sloppy performance at the awards ceremony. He rejects a dream woman who promises him an escape from loneliness, instead choosing to jump into his long-awaited Ferrari like he knows it will be the fulfillment of his death wish. He races through the eerily deserted streets of Rome and surrounding neighborhoods at breakneck speeds. (The precision high-speed driving of the stuntmen in these sequences is something to behold, as the sports car zooms around corners and dives into blind alleys barely illuminated by its headlights.) Of course, it all ends where Toby knew it would, where he secretly hoped it would: an end to the torment of his dissipated life.
Despite its short length and unusual subject matter, this is a Fellini film through and through. The movie is overpopulated with background characters, many of whom have fascinating faces that suggest they could support a movie of their own, and little one-second vignettes that remind us that Toby walks in a world populated by strangers, each with troubles of their own. Fellini’s connective montages are as good as they’ve ever been: on the drive from the airport to the TV studio, Toby watches two men shouting at each other and making rude gestures through their car windows; cut to a bus with people disembarking; suddenly two men come into frame in the foreground, arguing forehead-to-forehead; pan left to a crowd gathered to offer advice to a man stopped in the road with his car hood up; cut to police roping off the scene of an accident, with a motorcycle lying unattended in the road and the carabinieri waving the camera on before we can sort out the carnage. The film teems with chaos and untold dramas. So many things are subtly, and increasingly, wrong with the Rome Toby finds himself in: the hideously glowing orange sunset, the rabbi walking backwards in the airport, people wearing photographs of faces over their real faces, hippies in a field dressed in Sgt. Pepper costumes, the lifeless pedestrians on the nighttime streets.
It’s a cinematic crime that “Toby Dammit” fell through the cracks. Considered as a standalone work, it ranks as one of Fellini’s finest. It has star quality in Stamp, busy and baroque production design, satire, incredible high-speed car footage, a tight pace, pop-up weirdness, and an forbidding Gothic mood that Fellini never returned to. In short, it’s everything you could want in a Fellini short. It’s worth losing your head over.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
IMDB LINK: Toby Dammit (1968)
OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:
“Never Bet the Devil Your Head: A Tale with a Moral” – Poe’s original comic short story
HOME VIDEO INFO: “Toby Dammit” is surprisingly hard to find, at least at a reasonable price. It originally made it’s appearance on the anthology Spirits of the Dead and can still be found there—if you can locate a copy of the original omnibus. Used copies of Arrow’s 2010 Blu-ray/DVD combo pack go for premium prices, and you have to be careful to get the all-region version if your player can only handle North American releases. Home Vision Entertainment’s 2001 DVD is probably the cheapest option, but is of unknown quality (and is obviously taken from a pre-restoration print.) Good luck to you if you chose to go that route.
The Criterion Channel extracted “Toby Dammit” from The Spirits of the Dead (the segment had been independently restored as part of the large “Fellini 100” project), including it as a bonus feature in their “Essential Fellini” box set (buy) (you’ll find it, unheralded, on the Juliet of the Spirits disc). This is the best version of the film by far, and an argument for considering the movie as a standalone Fellini film. Criterion’s set is an expensive acquisition for most, but one which also nets you Fellini’s other Canonically Weird titles, 8 1/2, Fellini Satyricon, Roma, and Amarcord.
“Toby Dammit” is also available to stream either independently or as part of Spirits of the Dead on The Criterion Channel (subscription required).
I swear by now we could fill an entire book just with E.A. Poe adaptations!
Apparently, there was a sequence that illustrated that ‘Catholic Western’ that Toby starred in, but it was cut.
Tim Lucas’ monograph on SPIRITS OF THE DEAD published by Electric Dreamhouse goes into that a bit more; and in 2020 a Spanish filmmaker discovered negatives that were photographed on set from that sequence.
https://english.elpais.com/culture/2023-04-01/federico-fellinis-forgotten-western.html
A worthy addition to the Apocrypha. I suppose it gets missed since it comes at the end of an otherwise lackluster anthology film, but I discovered one year while watching it that if you start drinking at the beginning of Metzengerstein, and at a pace where you’re as drunk as Toby by the time the third part begins, it all works perfectly, and the ending then becomes truly nightmarish.