#Toby dammit series
There is a sudden cut to a series of shots, some documentary and some created in the studio, that show the interior of an airport. We sense the forced simulation of motion that these devices are meant to convey rather than any sense of actual speed. The landing lights of the airport recede mechanically into blackness. I knew she would be there waiting for me with her white ball. We hear the voice of Toby Dammit, a British actor played by Terence Stamp before we see him-his voce is decadent, laconic, resigned, exhausted: The plane grew closer and closer to Rome. In the plane's cockpit we see the landing lights of an airport at night directly behind the windshield as in a flight simulator. On the soundtrack the sound of a jet is too prominent for an interior shot. The only color in the following shot, and almost all subsequent shots for the next six minutes, will be monochrome, using red, yellow, blue and orange filters. The opening hand held shot is of a romantic late afternoon sky that then abruptly cuts to a static night shot of the interior of a jet's cockpit. The film begins with a sudden shift from day to night. (1) In short Toby Dammit is a dammed ass. Second Fellini takes the name Toby Dammit, Toby being an English slang term for ass in Poe's time. Fellini's work takes two elements from Poe's story: First the plot of a drunk who confronts a mysterious stranger on a bridge and bets him his head the man fails to see that the stranger is the devil who subsequently wins the bet.
Poe's work is a brief comic satire of the transcendentalist movements that were then popular in Europe and America. Fellini's film is an adaptation set in contemporary Rome of Poe's Never Bet the Devil Your Head published in 1841. The other two short films are William Wilson and Metzengerstein adapted by Louis Malle and Roger Vadim respectively. Fellini's Toby Dammit, a forty minute film made in 1968, is one of three short films adapted from stories by Edgar Allan Poe that were distributed together in Italy as Tre Passi Nel Delirio, in France as Histories Extraordinaires, and in England and the U.S.