William Wilson 8x10 Print.
Museum-quality posters made on thick matte paper.
• Paper thickness: 10.3 mil
• Paper weight: 189 g/m²
• Opacity: 94%
• ISO brightness: 104%
• Paper is sourced from Japan
As justifiably celebrated as "Toby Dammit" is, I find Louis Malle's contribution to "Spirits of the Dead" to be an accomplished Poe adaptation and doppelgänger tale in its own right. On a personal level, it was my formal introduction to Alain Delon, and it naturally made me a fan of his magnetically cool, calculating screen presence (Marco Stefanelli, whose father Benito was Sergio Leone's regular stunt coordinator, is no slouch as the character's younger self, either).
A detail I find interesting about the three segments of "Spirits" is that, despite the fact that Malle, Federico Fellini and Roger Vadim worked separately from each other on their segments, a key component of all three leads' paths to their eventual demise is a rejection of love and intimacy - in Malle's short, this is highlighted by Wilson's treatment of the blonde girl he abducts for a "surgical demonstration" (Katia Christine) and the gambler Giuseppina (a raven-haired Brigitte Bardot) as disposable toys for his sadistic games, rather than subjects to woo or court. There's also what seems to be a string of surprising debts to the world of James Bond - Delon is physically not unlike Ian Fleming's intended vision of 007 (right down to having a scar on his right cheek, a detail not found in the movies), while his game with Giuseppina feels like a subversive take on the hand of Baccarat Bond plays against Sylvia Trench in his iconic introductory scene in "Dr. No". - Patrick Moroney