TOBY DAMMIT MOVIE

By that token, anyone viewing Dammit after having submerged themselves in his most well-known and sometimes intentionally unbearably overdone standard titles will at once be delighted and then almost instantly bored with Dammit. In order to embrace the carnival in his worlds, you have to accept the fact that not only is ugly pretty and down up, but that the most foreign and alien thing of all is the most familiar. And that’s not even his deal with the literal devil.įellini’s worlds have always toyed with the notion of his boredom and utter contempt for anything but the most obnoxious, debased, unwholesome and disease-stricken.

Dammit could care less just as long as he gets what’s his, namely a sleek red Ferrari. On the ride from the airport, the studio suits regale him with the plot of the next project he’s working on, “a Christian western…a cross between Pasolini and John Ford,” making El Topo sound positively quaint. Still in his “impish good-looks” phase, Stamp alternates between making Dammit seem like a phantasm by day and a junkie by night. Toby Dammit (Terrence Stamp) peels himself off of the plane to Rome only to be greeted by a hazy, reddish-orange sky and a barrage of everyone from studio handlers to nuns to photographers. What makes it a great cult find is its appeal as a distillation of all that Fellini has said before in a compact, relatively light descent into Dammit’s personal nightmare. Rome is still a bewitching nightmare populated by plague victims and mannequins and Dammit is definitely a Fellini hero, a disillusioned, sickly, washed-up opportunist with a secret death wish hidden to even him. Despite the praise, Dammit nothing new from Fellini, except that this time he’s (very loosely) basing his material on a pre-existing text-Edgar Allen Poe’s Never Bet the Devil Your Head-and while the story is set in the Roman filmmaking industry, his protagonist is a washed-up British actor, making a familiar trip to the hyperbolic and semi-seriously intimate Rome of his previous films almost foreign. I can’t help but recall his dead-on criticism of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo, where he provided a critically engaging and fascinating commentary on Jodorowsky’s otherwise stupefying polemic.

TOBY DAMMIT MOVIE

Trumping both Louis Malle and Roger Vadim’s contributions, Dammit is considered to be head-and-shoulders the best segment in Spirits-Vincent Canby called it “a short movie but a major one.” If Vincent Canby loves it, you know that it’s just shy of being canonized as an unimpeachable cinematic icon.

For proof, look to Tim Burton, whose Beetlejuice swipes the haunted look of Fellini’s already ghastly protagonist and contorts it past its breaking point.

Clocking in at a brisk 37 minutes, Toby Dammit, Fellini’s contribution to the 1968 omnibus film Spirits of the Dead, is a minor epic and a major source of cult and critical affection. To think of a Fellini film shorter than two-hours long would be like expecting a Bollywood film to be shorter than 150 minutes. In the best of them, the chaotic pageantry he methodically orchestrates overwhelms the viewer and takes them on a journey through a playfully tortured imagination. His later surrealist works are unquestionably as convoluted as they are dazzling to behold. By now, the films of Federico Fellini have become synonymous with spiritual and sexual caricatures, grotesque personal carnivals that conflate the everyday with ornate and fantastic tableaux of surreal decadence.

Toby dammit