By Lee Pfeiffer
One of the most elusive Clint Eastwood films for fans to find on home video is also one of the most bizarre movies he's ever appeared in. MGM has released The Witches, a 1966 Italian movie, as a burn-to-order title. The film was designed as a showcase for actress Silvana Mangano, a would-be Italian superstar whose fame never reached the level of contemporaries like Sophia Loren and Claudia Cardinale. The patchwork movie offers Mangano in an acting tour-de-force, playing vastly different characters in off-beat short stories directed by such legendary names as Visconti and Pasolini. Virtually all of them are spirited, but strangely unaffecting and most end on an unsatisfying note.
Eastwood's episode, A Night Like Any Other, is the best of the lot, perhaps because it was directed by Vittoria De Sica. Eastwood shot the movie when his star was rising in Italy because of the Sergio Leone Westerns. In his native America, however, he was still largely known as a popular, but rather non-descript co-star on the Rawhide TV series. In this film, Eastwood is interestingly cast against type as a demure businessman whose preoccupation with the frustrations of his job leave him perpetually exhausted. Mangano is his sexually frustrated wife, a mousey woman who fantasizes about having an alter-ego as an exhibitionist diva who drives her husband crazy through her torrid sexual activities with legions of other men. In reality, she can't even lure him to stay awake long enough to resond to her attempts to seduce him. It's interesting to see Eastwood in this type of role, and he performs it well, playing a character who is so divorced from having fun that the idea of even taking his wife to a movie bores him. (In one amusing scene, he reads the titles of films playing in local theaters and refers to " A Fistful of Dollars - a Western"). The episode features some impressive set and production designs for the fantasy sequences and this one sequence represents the primary reason why the film will be of interest to anyone. The movie is presented in Italian but viewers have the option of seeing Eastwood's sequence in English language.
The Witches (which, despite the title, has nothing to do with the supernatural) is hardly a classic, but it is a rather fascinating footnote in Eastwood's career.
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