"Man in disorder—that's the only hope," announces a cherubic prisoner in Seven Beauties; and this about defines the breadth, if not the sophistication, of Lina Wertmuller's polemic thus far…. [She] deplores Hitler (and Mussolini) and is out of sorts with a System that traps her wide-eyed little man … somewhere between freely willed and predestined chagrin. Her throbbing camera is also not so secretly in love with this socio-political System, just as her neorealist predecessors were with the war-bruised and compromised city of Rome. For with what else would she justify her messy sexual romanticism or cloak and bawdy comedy and subliminal cruelty that are the backbones of an often redundant but increasingly provocative body of work?…

In Wertmuller vernacular, man usurps the classic female "receptacle" role in his relationship with the bullish lust of the political system. Women in turn are portrayed as either instruments or ornaments...