Seven Beauties (1975)
- General info
- Available formats
- Synopsis:
- Pasqualino (Giancarlo Giannini), an Italian everyman, deserts the army during World War II. Germans capture him and send him to a prison camp, where he does just about anything to survive. In lengthy flashbacks, we see him and his family of seven unattractive sisters (the seven beauties), his accidental murder of one sister's lover, his confession and imprisonment, his calculated switch to an asylum, his rape of a patient, and his volunteering to be a soldier to escape confinement. To the chagrin of his obese German captor, his weak, cowardly character enables him to survive the war and return to Naples where he has a plan to survive the next world catastrophe.
- Actors:
- Giancarlo Giannini, Fernando Rey, Shirley Stoler, Elena Fiore, Piero Di Iorio, Enzo Vitale, Roberto Herlitzka, Lucio Amelio, Ermelinda De Felice, Bianca D'Origlia, Francesca Marciano, Mario Conti, Barbara Valmorin, Emilio Salvatori, Aristide Caporale
- Directors:
- Lina Wertmüller
- Producers:
- Arrigo Colombo, Lina Wertmüller
- Writers:
- Lina Wertmüller
- Others:
- Lina Wertmüller
- Aka:
- Pasqualino Settebellezze
- Genres:
- Action & Adventure, Classics, Comedy, Drama
- Collections:
- Award Winners, Getting to Know..., Oscar Nominations Competition 2024, Oscar Nominations Competition 2025, Oscar Nominations Competition 2026, The Biggest Oscar Snubs: Part 1, The Coppola Clan: Hollywood's Most Creative Family, Top 10 Best Picture Follow-Ups, Top Films
- Countries:
- Italy
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Reviews (1) of Seven Beauties
Oh Yeah. - Seven Beauties review by griggs
There’s something almost confrontational about the way Lina Wertmüller opens Seven Beauties — a sardonic newsreel montage set to a jaunty tune that more or less dares you to keep up.
Oh yeah.
Giancarlo Giannini is superb as Pasqualino, a vain Neapolitan peacock whose every moral compromise makes him a bit harder to back — until the film drops him into a concentration camp and you catch yourself thinking: surely not even he deserves this. Wertmüller is too smart to answer that for us, and the film is all the better for it.
Oh yeah.
The Naples material is a blast: all swagger, vanity and absurd masculine theatre. Staircases are not simply walked down but performed. “In Napoli we use our imagination” is an all-timer of a line, and Giannini’s face does half the film’s work on its own. He can suggest panic, vanity and calculation in one close-up.
Oh yeah.
It does not all land equally. This strain of Italian comedy still isn't entirely my bag, and at times the film feels like it is daring me to admire it rather than love it. But the cinematography is gorgeous, the final stretch hits hard, and the ending absolutely earns itself. The first film directed by a woman to be nominated for Best Director at the Oscars, and still far too strange and spiky to feel like safe Academy fare. Then again, most great films are.
Oh yeah.