Volume 23, Number 4 · March 18, 1976
All Mixed Up
By Michael Wood
Seven Beauties
directed by Lina Wertmüller
Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August
directed by Lina Wertmüller
All Screwed Up
directed by Lina Wertmüller
There is a sequence in Lina Wertmüller's Love and Anarchy which represents very well both the charm and the weakness of her films. A simple Italian country lad comes up to Rome to shoot Mussolini, oversleeps his cue for the assassination, and slaughters several carabinieri in a fury of regret. He tries to escape, but is caught, tortured, and killed. But he overslept because the girl who loves him, the heroine of the romance in a brothel which has taken up most of the movie, wouldn't wake him; because she didn't want him to sacrifice himself, because nothing, in her view, is worth dying for. She is warned that he will hate her for saving his life, and he does. Yet her girlfriend and colleague in the brothel, a devoted anarchist eager to wake the would-be killer, discovers that she too is really a woman at heart, and agrees to let him sleep.
Review, 3552 words
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