Lina Wertmüller & Her Beauties

Lina Wertmüller & Her Beauties

A provocateur who produced some of the biggest arthouse blockbusters of the ’70s, Lina Wertmüller—instantly recognizable in her signature white-framed glasses—was debated, venerated, and decried at the height of her fame, but her erotically and politically charged bomb-throwing films couldn’t be ignored. With this collection of five of her finest, most inflammatory features—and Behind the White Glasses, a documentary portrait of the director—we guarantee you’ll have plenty to grapple with. “[Wertmüller’s] pictures were funny and frighteningly harrowing and big and emotional and over-the-top and popular… This was a very special artistic vision.”—Martin Scorsese

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Lina Wertmüller & Her Beauties
  • The Seduction of Mimi

    Directed by Lina Wertmüller | 108 mins | 1972
    The kind of potent cocktail of sex and politics only Wertmüller can concoct, The Seduction of Mimi stars Giancarlo Giannini as a laborer being wooed by both the unions and the mafioso while he runs back-and-forth between his hot-to-trot mistress and h...

  • Love & Anarchy

    Directed by Lina Wertmüller | 120 mins | 1973
    Country bumpkin anarchist Giancarlo Giannini arrives in Rome on a mission to assassinate Mussolini with the assistance of partisan prostitute Mariangela Melato in Wertmüller’s 1930s-set tragicomedy—but his resolve falters when he falls for Tripolina (...

  • Swept Away

    Directed by Lina Wertmüller | 114 mins | 1974
    A battle royale of the sexes/classes begins when vacationing socialite Mariangela Melatoand her Communist servant Giancarlo Giannini find themselves stranded alone together on a Mediterranean island in Wertmüller’s kinky, anarchic reworking of "The Ta...

  • All Screwed Up

    Directed by Lina Wertmüller | 105 mins | 1974
    Wertmüller’s wild, woolly working-class satire of the fantasy of upward mobility focuses on a cadre of Sicilian migrants living in a Milan commune as they struggle to make ends meet as kitchen employees while simultaneously avoiding unwanted pregnanci...

  • Seven Beauties

    Directed by Lina Wertmüller | 116 mins | 1975
    The comedy of errors begins when Neapolitan hustler Giancarlo Giannini inadvertently murders the lover of one of his septet of homely sisters. Worse luck follows, and Giannini lands in a concentration camp where, in order to survive, the practiced lot...