Lina Wertmuller has nowhere to go but up after her ill-fated English-language movie, A Night Full of Rain …, but I am not sure how far up Blood Feud … actually gets. The plot is a kind of Sicilian Casablanca in the style of Seven Beauties with accompanying lectures on feminism, fascism, radical chic, abortion, machismo, and the contradictions between personal and political morality. The style of presentation oscillates between grand opera and Punch and Judy. From the beginning of her career, Wertmuller's artistic strategies have exhausted me more than they have entertained me….

By setting the film in the early period of Fascist rule in Italy, Wertmuller is able to transfigure characters who might otherwise be merely sordid and ridiculous in their flamboyantly carnal gropings, but I am a little suspicious of her facile equations of the Black Shirts and the Mafiosi. And by the time the gunplay reaches...