This biting fable on the perils of celebrity is Visconti's contribution to the compilation film The Witches, produced by Dino De Laurentiis to showcase his wife, Silvana Mangano. Mangano plays an international movie queen who visits a friend's Swiss chalet hoping for relaxation, but instead finds herself besieged by the other houseguests. Mangano's “cool, sensuous movements and Visconti's seductive imagery anticipate the erotic passages in such later masterworks as Conversation Piece and The Innocent....(The Witch Burned Alive) is charged with that sense of personal urgency and passionate commitment which this great director brought to each and every film” (George Morris, Soho Weekly News).