That Wertmüller's new film, The End of the World in Our Usual Bed in a Night Full of Rain, is an almost total failure should, on reflection, not be surprising. This is the story of the courtship and marriage of a young American woman photographer and an Italian journalist … which has to carry several bone-crushing burdens….

Though the film is adequately Englished, it has clearly been thought and felt in Italian, and thinking and feeling are much harder to translate than words. The result is a certain crude oversimplification of plot and character—to say nothing of dialogue—that is very different from Wertmüller's usual healthy vulgarity studded with flashes of poetry.

Secondly, for the first time in her film-making career, the director was creating something intended to be serious drama; yet her background in comedy obtruded comic timing, comic situations, vaguely comic turns of phrase...