Flashback, May 1975: ‘Seven Beauties’ Scores With Pitch-Black Satire on the Death Camps

With the world premiere of Seven Beauties in France in May 1975, Lina Wertmüller not only maintained the buzz surrounding her since Love and Anarchy three years before, but reached what turned out to be her career zenith.  

No other filmmaker had created such a brand of biting, individually rendered satire since Preston Sturges’ run of Hollywood comedies in the early 1940s.

Then, like Sturges, Wertmüller made the mistake of releasing a movie that didn’t make money—and found her critical cachet as depleted as her box office grosses.

Even notoriously acerbic movie critic John Simon hailed her in a New York Magazine cover story as “The Most Important Film Director Since Ingmar Bergman." 

Such was the acclaim and attention that she became the first female to be nominated for a Best Director Oscar with this film, briefly reminding Hollywood that women had been at the forefront of industry back in the silent era.

Her iconoclastic views on class, sex, and politics in The Seduction of Mimi, Love and Anarchy, and Swept Away—all featuring Giancarlo Giannini as an antihero—set the stage for this latest triumph, at a time when loosened censorship made these topics a matter of incessant debate among cinephiles.

What made her work so compelling—and, at the same time, flummoxed many viewers—was Wertmuller’s refusal to fit neatly into an ideological box. Professedly a socialist, she gravitated more toward anarchism. (Pedro, a philosophical concentration camp inmate, echoes the director’s belief that “A new man in disorder is our only hope.”) Though a trailblazing female director, she evinced little interest in feminism.

The filmmaker’s creative methods were as unconventional as her subjects. The supercharged, slapstick energy of the films of her prime derives from her early training in the Italian commedia dell'arte form, characterized by extensive improvisation.

Most of the film’s scorn is directed at Giannini’s Pasqualino Frafuso, a small-time Neapolitan hood sarcastically nicknamed “Seven Beauties” for the group of homely sisters whose honor he continually boasts of protecting.

Flashbacks detail how his foolish machismo lead him to kill one sister’s pimp, fall into the hands of the police (right after boasting loudly that he’d never be taken alive), fake insanity to avoid jail, volunteer for service in Mussolini’s army when he fears he will go crazy with other lunatics, desert from the Eastern Front, and find himself in a German concentration camp. He is now face to face with the question: how far will he go to survive?

That turns out to be desperately far: first, when he decides to seduce the grotesque, pitiless female camp commandment, then when given charge of fellow inmates—including with responsibility for selecting who will live and who will die.

The lesson that Wertmuller drives home—that the horrors of Fascism become possible not just by political criminals who seize control of the state, but by the supine complicity of ordinary citizens—comes early in the film, when Pasqualino and fellow army escapee Francesco stumble upon Nazi soldiers perpetrating a massacre against helpless prisoners in an open field.

Carefully hiding while watching helplessly from a distance, Pasqualino and Francesco debate what they could have done. Francesco says that they are accomplices in the atrocity: “We didn't make a sound, didn't come out and spit in their faces.”

Nothing doing, Pasqualino counters: that would just be a “useless suicide.”

But Francesco persists: “No, it wouldn't have been useless because in the face of certain things you've got to say no, and instead I said yes to Mussolini, to duty, and to all that crap.”

As demonstrated in Maureen Orth’s October 1975 profile in Newsweek, Wertmuller indulged her penchant for non-professional actors by including the American journalist (originally on a brief leave of absence as her assistant) and her mother among the extras as a prostitute and her madam.

Like mentor Federico Fellini (for whom she worked on 8½), she sought unusual, sometimes grotesque, faces. Moreover, she often preferred visual to verbal instructions forgoing a translation of her remarks to the American actress Shirley Stoler, saying, “I don’t care if she understands what I say, I just want her to imitate what I do.”

Despite its considerable critical acclaim, Seven Beauties has not lacked detractors, then or now. Like Wertmuller’s prior films, it featured graphic violence (including rape, which has troubled many feminists who would otherwise champion her work).

Although its depiction of the Nazi death camps is grim, its tone veers as often into the satiric as the sorrowful. In the opening minutes, grainy black-and-white images of World War II contrast with a sardonic male voice-over intoning, “Oh, yeah” two dozen times (“The ones who vote for the right because they're fed up with strikes. Oh yeah. The ones who vote white in order not to get dirty. The ones who never get involved with politics. Oh yeah.”)

The repetition feels much like the “so it goes” mantra that Kurt Vonnegut used to comment on the senseless carnage of that conflict in Slaughterhouse Five.  The sequence is a necessary prelude to understand how Pasqualino will exhibit the amoral survival instincts of a cockroach.

Furthermore, though the Nazi victims onscreen include political dissidents and deserters, none are specifically identified as Jewish, even though that group was the major target of Nazi extermination schemes. That fact is all the more surprising given that Wertmuller based her screenplay on an Italian-Jewish death-camp survivor who, like Pasqualino, killed his sister’s pimp—and whom she even cast as an extra.

Seven Beauties opened in broader release around the world in the fourth quarter of 1975, giving it exposure for Oscar consideration. In the end, the film came away with four nominations (including for Wertmuller and Giannini) but no wins. (Even in the Best Foreign Film category, it lost to Black and White in Color.)

For a while, it seemed that Wertmuller’s white eyeglasses would become as synonymous with Italian cinema as Fellini’s Borsalino fedora. Hollywood even came calling, courtesy of a four-film contract she signed with Warner Bros. But after the failed English-language A Night Full of Rain (1978), the studio canceled the remaining three projects.

The filmmaker returned to Italy, making 16 more films for the big screen—each one progressively more strident and less available in America than the last. 

Yet the likes of Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, Kathryn Bigelow, and Greta Gerwig owe her a debt for making manifest the possibilities inherent in a female director’s vision—and Hollywood recognized that contribution by awarding her an Honorary Award, at age 91, for her career in 2019, two years before her death.

With Eurocommunism in fashion in the year of the release of Seven Beauties, few could have predicted the end of Marxism as a viable force. But fewer still could have guessed that far-right nationalism would stage a comeback in Wertmuller’s Italy a half-century later, let alone that it would enter the United States.

That situation makes viewing Seven Beauties far more disturbing today than it was at the time. Its opening minutes of World War II footage immediately connect an ignorant, benighted, machismo-dominated populace to life in a dictatorship.

Thinking, a socialist tells Pasqualino while the two are awaiting prison, is “the most atrocious crime a citizen could commit.” In the present state of democracies worldwide, thinking is as dangerous as Wertmuller’s political prisoner suggests, but also as much of an absolute necessity.