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Some way through Seven Beauties (1975), Lina Wertmüller's most celebrated film, a petty Neapolitan crook conscripted into the Italian army during WWII escapes from a bombed train, and flees through forest and countryside in the middle of nowhere. He stumbles onto a secluded cottage, where a scantily clad Fräulein sings Wagner at the piano, and an old woman sits in an abundantly stocked larder. As the starving Pasqualino Settebellezze (his nickname translates as "Seven Beauties") helps himself to provisions, he explains his actions to his reluctant hostess:
I'm an Italian soldier. Understand? No? That's okay, German lady.. .Italian soldier, Naples. Sunshine, blue water, mandolins. Understand? A pizza pie with tomatoes on top, or macaroni.
Pasqualino uses the language of cliché and stereotype to communicate the genuine truth of his situation to someone from a different nation and culture. It is a moment of self-reflexivity in the supremely self-reflexive cinema of Lina Wertmüller. She spent her entire career explaining her country to outsiders. The outsider who stopped to listen the longest was the United States. In the mid-1970s, America took Wertmüller to its bosom. Her films played to packed houses in New York; in Valerio Ruiz's documentary Behind the White Glasses (2015), Giancarlo Giannini recalls walking through Times Square with Wertmüller as four of her films played simultaneously in different theaters. The celebrated movie on which she worked as Federico Fellini's assistant director was reportedly rereleased as "Lina Wertmüller's 8?." Cineaste published an unprecedented three articles on Wertmüller in 1976 alone, including the delightfully titled "How Left Is Lina?" (a reminder of the vanished idealism and the high stakes of film criticism at the time). Seven Beauties was nominated for four Oscars, including Best Original Screenplay and Best Director (Wertmüller was the first woman nominated for the latter award). Warner Bros. contracted her to make four English-language films. Ernest Ferlita and John R. May's monograph The Parables ofLina Wertmüller was published in 1977, as was an edition of her screenplays introduced by her most famous (or infamous) supporter, John Simon, the ruthless and feared theater and film critic.
Fragments of this hyperbolic adulation are remembered in the publicity for the Blurays of several Wertmüller films recently issued by Kino Lorber-"One of the major film talents of...