["Seven Beauties"] is a grotesque vaudeville show. It's one act after another, with political labels stuck on the participants so you'll know what you're watching. The players come on at a sprint; they're overly spirited—the juice of life oozes out all over the place in a chorus of "Mamma mia"s. Wertmüller dances around with a hand-held camera and hauls the acts offstage fast, swinging from pathos to burlesque so that audiences won't become restless….

"Seven Beauties" is a slapstick-tragedy investigation of an Italian common man's soul, set during the Second World War, with flashbacks to the thirties. (p. 104)

The satirical "Oh Yeah" song that opens the film has a good cabaret pungency (though the political montage that accompanies it is mediocre), and there is an imaginative moment of gallows-humor cheekiness when the emaciated Pasqualino woos the commandant by humming a little love song. On the plus side, that's about it….

In the tradition of broad popular theatre, "Seven Beauties" is all punctuation, and the Neapolitan scenes reinforce the clichés of Italian noisiness. In the German scenes, Wertmüller achieves the effect of liveliness through one whammy after another…. Past and present, Pasqualino's life is a comic strip of horrors….

Pasqualino is everybody's dupe—a man who has swallowed all the lies that society hands out. He believes what the Mafia tells him, what Mussolini tells him, what anybody in authority tells him….

He's the contemptible survivor. In "Swept Away," Wertmüller enthusiastically reactivated such audience-pleasers as the notion that a frigid rich woman gets her first sexual satisfaction when she has a working-class lover. In "Seven Beauties," she reactivates the entire comic-opera view of Italians as cowards who will grovel to survive. The commandant is an intelligent, dedicated idealist-sadist—a master-race superwoman…. Wertmüller's grotesqueries, such as the gross commandant, as bored as a sphinx, sitting, yawning, with her thighs spread while the scrawny, enfeebled Pasqualino tries to penetrate her, and the incessant, shrill obnoxiousness of the shrew on the yacht in "Swept Away," are appeals to the coarsest prejudices…. If it's easy to get laughs by sending the camera up fat women's thick legs and fleshy arms or by showing women as barnyard creatures—or as petit-bourgeois manipulators, like the women in the commune, or as rich teases, like Mariangela Melato's role in "Swept Away"—Wertmüller runs with the pack. (p. 107)

"Seven Beauties" might have had some comic shape if it had been structured so that Pasqualino's sugaring the commandant stirred a romantic response in her. But Wertmüller betrays her own comic premise, pushing for something big, and so we get prescient speeches by the commandant about how Nazism is doomed by its idealism and vision of order, and how worms like this little Italian will survive….

The terrible thing about the movie is the absence of weight in these passages. The humiliations, the punishments, the horrors don't develop out of the characters or situations. They're just injected into the clowning-around atmosphere. They're hypes for us—kicky effects to give us a charge. But with that pious moralizing on top of them. So when the anarchist sinks in the muck, we're supposed to grin and shudder at the effect and, at the same time, think, Yes, he's doing that because life for him has become drowning in excrement. You don't feel a thing…. Wertmüller says she's a Socialist and/or an Anarchist, but the ugliness of the human material she shows us cannot all be blamed on economic oppression; the habitual closeups are merciless because the faces have no depth. (pp. 108-09)

For all the political babbling of her characters, the meaning of "Seven Beauties" is deeply reactionary and misogynous. It gets an audience response by confirming what people, in their most superstitious recesses, already believe: that "human nature" stinks and nothing can be done about it. The characters are squealing pigs and worms or else they're martyrs—a perfect dichotomy for the guilt-ridden in the audience who know damned well they don't want to be martyrs. Pasqualino the worm is also the most human of the characters. And, look, he isn't entirely soft and wormy: he can get an erection. All that's left at the end of the movie is his ability to procreate and bring more larvae into the world, which is a teeming bordello. Wertmüller presents all this in a goofy, ebullient mood. (p. 109)