Fellini, speaking to writer Charlotte Chandler for her book I, Fellini, explained, “I consciously try to conceal the machinery of the film I am making.

His ever-growing intoxication and mental and emotional instability are reflected by the film’s style. She, too, might represent innocence, something that Toby - who quips that he uses all kinds of drugs “to get back to normal” - has long since lost. Then again, maybe this devil isn’t evil in any conventional sense. He had already called himself out on this, so to speak, through the critic’s advice to Guido in 8½ (1963): “And what is the meaning of the capricious apparitions of the girl of the spring? An offer of purity? Of warmth to the protagonist? Of all your story’s overabundant symbols, this is the worst.” The best example might be Gelsomina in La Strada (1954) Paola, trying to communicate something to Marcello at the end of La Dolce Vita (1960), is another. The fact that evil is embodied by such an ostensibly harmless figure not only goes against expectations (and against Poe’s story, in which the apparent devil is an old man), but also subverts a common presence in Fellini’s films: the girl or young woman who represents innocence. “For me the devil is friendly and joyful,” he explains on the talk show. One of these demons takes physical form - at least to Toby’s troubled mind - as a child (Marina Yaru) wearing a white dress and playing with a ball. Before he can receive it, however, he has to put in an appearance on a talk show and then at an award ceremony, becoming increasingly drunk and distressed as he struggles with his strange surroundings and his own demons. In Fellini’s take on the story, the titular Toby (Terence Stamp) is a washed up, alcoholic British actor who flies to Rome in order to shoot “the first Catholic western.” He has no interest in the project itself he just wants the Ferrari that he’s been promised in payment. (“If each blow in the proper direction drives an evil propensity out, it follows that every thump in an opposite one knocks its quota of wickedness in.”) Toby’s great vice is using the phrase “I’ll bet the Devil my head,” and though the narrator urges him to give it up, he stubbornly refuses to do so - and pays for it. Its narrator relates the unfortunate history of his friend Toby Dammit, a man corrupted by his mother’s habit of beating him with her left hand instead of her right, going against the rotation of the earth. Despite the supernatural title and a definite morbid streak, it’s not a Gothic tale of terror primarily intended to send shivers up the reader’s spine instead, it’s a satire on the idea that every piece of literature should contain a moral, as well as an attack on the then-popular transcendentalist movement. “Never Bet the Devil Your Head” isn’t the sort of story with which Poe tends to be associated. While the Poe connection may not be obvious, another authorial hand is much more in evidence: “Toby Dammit” is unmistakably the work of director Federico Fellini. Moreover, the credits of at least one edition of the film describe it as “liberally adapted” from Poe’s 1841 short story “Never Bet the Devil Your Head,” a rather obscure tale to begin with. Unlike the first two episodes - “Metzengerstein” (directed by Roger Vadim and starring Jane Fonda and Peter Fonda) and “William Wilson” (directed by Louis Malle and starring Alain Delon and Brigitte Bardot), both period pieces - “Toby Dammit” is set firmly in the late 1960s. The 1968 anthology film Spirits of the Dead is based on the work of Edgar Allan Poe, but a viewer who neglects to read the on-screen text might be forgiven for failing to recognize the third and final segment as a Poe adaptation.

Toby dammit