That Wertmuller is a thoroughly professional show-woman with an astonishing knack for the comic as well as the grotesque can hardly be denied. But is all the commotion about politically conscious cinema really justified?

Consider Love and Anarchy. Despite the quotation from Enrico Malatesta, a 19th Century anarchist, the film has no politically revolutionary moral…. The film may be sensitive to the interaction between the personal and the political, but the individualistic description it gives is thoroughly unrepresentative of the development of political consciousness among Italy's peasant and working classes, recognized as one of the most advanced in Western Europe. The film's focus on a politically naive individual carries the implication that the people are unaware and unprepared; it becomes a warning against the assumed irresponsibility of the masses, hardly a revolutionary attitude.

Swept Away takes the notion of irresponsibility a step further. From the opening moment when...