Le streghe

• Despite the witch-bait title, this is a commedia all'italiana anthology, not a horror film — every 'witch' is a variation on Silvana Mangano, who happened to be married to producer Dino De Laurentiis, and who stars in all five segments.
• Five major Italian directors split the film: Mauro Bolognini, Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Franco Rossi, and Vittorio De Sica. It was produced in 1965 and held until its Italian release on February 22, 1967.
• Clint Eastwood appears in De Sica's closing segment as Mangano's repressed, buttoned-up husband — filmed right as the Dollars trilogy was making him a star. He was reportedly gifted a Ferrari by De Laurentiis as thanks for the role.
• The film's US release was held back to protect Eastwood's rising-star image from being 'dragged to earth' by something this offbeat — it stayed largely unseen in America for years, surfacing only in a brief 1969 New York run via United Artists' Lopert division.
• Pasolini's segment, 'The Earth Seen from the Moon,' reunited comic legend Totò with Pasolini regular Ninetto Davoli — the same pairing from Pasolini's 'Uccellacci e uccellini' (The Hawks and the Sparrows) the year before — in broad, fable-like slapstick.
• It carries the distinction of being the last Totò film released during his lifetime — he died on April 15, 1967, weeks after the premiere. Cinematography was by Giuseppe Rotunno, with music from Piero Piccioni and Ennio Morricone.

The 'witch' framing is the real subject, not a genre cue. Across all five segments the men keep casting Mangano as something otherworldly — diva, temptress, enigma — and the joke is that the supernatural label is just what men slap on a woman they refuse to actually see. The horror, if there is any, is social: the witch hunt as a metaphor for projection.

De Sica's closing segment is the cruelest read on the whole project. Mangano's bored wife escapes into a lurid comic-book fantasy precisely because her real husband (Eastwood) is a void of repression — the anthology saves its sharpest knife for last, suggesting domestic respectability is the actual monster.

Pasolini's 'Earth Seen from the Moon' smuggles his recurring obsession into the comedy: the holy fool. Totò and Davoli's bumbling search for a new wife plays as slapstick, but the death-and-resurrection beat reframes the 'witch' as a sacred, almost mythic figure — Pasolini using the film's frivolous container to sneak in his fascination with the sublime hiding inside the lowly.

Five directors, one star, and a title that promises more darkness than it delivers. Dino De Laurentiis built this 1967 portmanteau as a showcase for his wife, Silvana Mangano, who fronts every segment as a different "witch" — less hag, more the impossible woman men can't read. The stories run satirical, not supernatural: a diva crashes a high-society party, a Sicilian wife's repressed longing detonates into a bloody family feud, a neglected bourgeois wife fantasizes escape. Bolognini, Visconti, Pasolini, Rossi, and De Sica each take a turn dissecting how Italian men mythologize the women in front of them.