[The credits of "Let's Talk About Men"] take us back to an era that had a notably romantic view of differences between the sexes. But Wertmüller's gaudy, droll humor is not of a kind to indulge longing thoughts that the past was better. If her characters are sometimes showoffs, cowards, piratical buffoons, that is because they are of the multitude's making; they are the crowd's flunkies. Wertmüller sees her characters with a sense of context. They are struggling individuals held back by their origins: products poorly manufactured by society. (p. 82)

Sometimes the idea is cultivate now that Lina Wertmüller, simply because she is a woman, can be judged adequately only by women's-lib theorists, who tend to have literal minds about the activities of heroes and heroines in art. But she is not a didacticist; she is a filmmaker and a writer (she wrote this film...