The Witches

This portmanteau picture, featuring work by some of Italy's most celebrated directors, gave Clint Eastwood a rare opportunity to appear in a European art movie. He features in Vittorio De Sica's bookend segment as a banker being forced to compete with comic-book characters for the love of his bored wife, Mrs Dino De Laurentiis herself, Silvana Mangano. Mangano also stars in the other four stories - playing a holidaying movie star in Luchino Visconti's opener; a woman driver whose dithering spells trouble for injured trucker Alberto Sordi; a spinster with a short-fused father in Franco Rossi and Luigi Magni's Sicilian comedy; and an imaginary maid in Pier Paolo Pasolini's silent gem. As a whole, the movie is inconsistent, but the individual segments are intriguing nonetheless.