Rating: 
Summary: Great DVD transfer, oh yeah!
Review: Finally, an excellent job by Fox-Lorber (just about time, isn't it?). The image in widescreen is sharp and the colors are right. A few forgivable scratches and artifacts here and there but excellent throughout. Can't complain about the sound (mono) which is clear anyway and I think that's how it was when it was first released in theatres. The different interactive menus have music from the film which is a delight thinking that Fox-Lorber did it. Chapter searches are few (6) and far in between but that's okay (since Fox-Lorber is known for that). The only thing missing is the booklet which the company never does anyway (I wonder why). Anyway, the film is great and deserves the treatment it got for its transfer. Fascinating treatment by Wertmuller about a war-deserter who reflects on his life before he ended up in a German concentration camp. Very funny and poignant leading to a searing ending. Images show touches of Fellini whom Wertmuller studied under, yet this movie, which resonates greatness and already a classic is entirely her own. Unforgettable!
Rating:
Summary: My favorite movie
Review: I have been searching everywhere for this movie since I saw it in my Italian class in college. I think it's the best movie ever made. At times it's touching, sad, and funny. It's a wonderful tale about survival and how each person has one special quality that can save them. For Pasqualino, it is his ability to woo women. For him to muster up his libido while so very close to death in order to save his life is a very heroic deed. Giancarlo Giannini and Shirley Stoler are great in this movie. It's very similar to "Life Is Beautiful", but that movie is much more of a fable than this one. Not to detract anything from "Life Is Beautiful" (which I think is a very good movie) but I think "Seven Beauties" is a superior film. Thank you Amazon for making this fantastic film available to me!
Rating:
Summary: Unfogettable, great acting
Review: I have not seen this film in 15 years I still think its the best movie I ve seen.
Rating: 
Summary: Hideous!
Review: I knew that this film was a turkey from the get-go: Archival footage of war catastrophe accompanies an obnoxious voiceover of some guy repeating ad nauseam, "oh yeah! oh yeah!" Fighter pilots crash and burn, and we have this annoying, idiotic, "oh yeah, oh yeah." There's a beautifully photographed scene shortly after this, set in a lush German forest. The camera should have stayed in that shot. Watching the green leaves sway outpaces everything to come. I thought the mass grave shooting was handled with taste. In fact, it's less shockingly portrayed than the gross Italian dance hall bit that follows, a sequence that runs on entirely too long, close-ups of an unattractive, untalented woman who is later thrashed around by her brother, the Giancarlo Giannini character -- a man who's impossible either to care about or laugh at. Awful, sick, repellent, and worst of all, empty and uninsightful. People, just because a movie is unpleasant does not make it a masterpiece. I like difficult, challenging films; Seven Beauties, however, is squalid junk posing as art.
Rating:
Summary: I thought it was harrowing, a better movie than Life is beau
Review: I thought Giannini making love to a Nazi female monster to save his life is a more harrowing detail than all the tiny prevarications of Benigni in Life is Beautiful, as Guido trying to save his son. The two movies should be set against each other, because of a certain similarity in their themes. Both show Italian captives inhumanly suffering at the hands of Nazis during the Second Waorld War. Seven Beauties never got the attention it deserved in the United Sates--which is too bad. Perhaps a showing of it in some remote art house might revive interest in it. This movie, though, is quite unlike Life, in being almost entirely Italian in tone and image, presenting itself in kaleidoskopic imagery, reminding much of Fellini; it is a mixture of comedy and tradegy, but that is consistently true throughout the movie, while Life begins as a comedy and shifts to tragedy in a manner which some viewers found inconsistent. But enough of comparisons; see Seven Beauties if you are interested in good cinema. Watching it is a harrowing experience but utterly worth it.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best Italian films
Review: I've decided to watch this one to form an objective opininon on the director, Lina Wertmuller. This movie is in such a sharp contrast with her other movie, Swept Away, which I found a failure. However, I wouln't hesitate to call this one a masterpiece, for me it is a multi-dimentional film, impossible to say that it's all about survival. I think it's about a one's loss of his soul; the final scene when his mother is saying that he is alive, he doesn't seem to fully agree, althought physically he is indeed alive. A very powerful film, much more complex that Life Is Beautiful. One has to wonder if Lina Wertmuller had the same quality swings as Ken Russell, for example, where Lisztomania cannot even come close to Mahler.
Rating:
Summary: A challenging, troublesome masterpiece of a movie.
Review: Lina Wertmeuller was at the peak of her abilities with this film, and the performances she achieves from her actors are startling. This is definitely cinema for the head. Watch this to be challenged, not to be entertained. This ranks as one of my favorites.
Rating:
Summary: Foreign cinema at its finest
Review: Never mind any fallacious negative reviews written by misguided souls... "Seven Beauties" is an inarguable cinematic classic.
In 1976, Lina Wertm?ller (Love and Anarchy, Ciao, Professore!, and the original Swept Away... by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August) became the first woman to earn an Academy Award nomination for "Best Director" with Seven Beauties. Her biggest international hit, the film was also nominated for ?Best Foreign Film? and ?Best Actor? (Giancarlo Giannini, in an astonishing performance.)
?A new man in disorder is our only hope.?
An acerbic, surreal work of genius about survival and concession, Seven Beauties occurs during World War II. Worn-down army deserters Pasqualino Frafuso (Giancarlo Giannini) and Francesco (Piero De Orio) are lost and wandering in a labyrinthine forest when they happen upon a horrific mass execution of civilians by German soldiers. They are revolted, but to intervene would be suicide. Francesco divulges his opposition to the Nazis, and Pasqualino discloses his iniquitous past. Back in pre-WWII Naples, Pasqualino was an amoral, petty mafioso hood nick-named ?Seven Beauties,? a swaggering small-time crook who lived off the earnings of his seven unappealing sisters while professing to defend their honor. Pasqualino vows revenge when haughty pimp Totonno (Mario Conti) puts his sister Concettina (Elena Fiore) on the market. He kills Totonno, and in perhaps the most brazenly comical dismemberment scene committed to film, he chops up the body and mails different sections around the country. This proves an unwise decision, as Pasqualino is caught and sentenced. Escaping the death penalty, he is incarcerated in an asylum. Here he brashly commits sexual assault against another patient and receives shock treatment. Ejected from the asylum, he accepts the choice to join the army and fight for Mussolini. He and Francesco desert, only to be captured by the Nazis, and they are shipped to a concentration camp. Here Pasqualino endures the camp?s atrocities, but plots his escape by relinquishing any remaining dignity, and attempts a repellent, pathetic seduction of a corpulent German commandant (a formidable Shirley Stoler). ?I?m ready to do anything to live. Anything.?
In a theme borrowed by Roberto Benigni for Life is Beautiful (and also slightly reminiscent of the unreleased and supposedly appalling Jerry Lewis film The Day the Clown Cried), Seven Beauties provides a genuinely unparalleled and irreverent treatment of staid, humorless themes (mental hospitals, concentration camps, war) with a sardonic tragedy-meets-comedy approach. Much of this is often jarring and difficult to watch, but such was Wertm?ller's narrative style. The Fellini influence is unmistakable in numerous sequences, but considering Fellini?s mastery of the cinematic form, this is far from a shortcoming. Wertm?ller effectively juxtaposes flashbacks of the disturbingly humorous events in Naples and the misery of the concentration camp. Giancarlo Giannini is phenomenal in the lead role, giving one of cinema?s all-time greatest performances as a morally bankrupt, abhorrent antihero Pasqualino. Luis Bu?uel regular Fernando Rey has a superb cameo, as well.
With the success of Seven Beauties, Warner Brothers promptly signed Wertm?ller to a four-picture deal. She was duly praised for defending the underdog in her movies, her steadfast feminism, and her radical approach to her subject matter. However, the tide turned and the dodgy Tinseltown sharks attacked after the poor box-office showing of her first Warners project, The End of the World in Our Usual Bed in a Night Full of Rain (1976). The contract was brusquely cancelled. Of course, due to box office failure and a fading star in the U.S., she was speciously berated for the so-called insincerity of her vision and her lack of empathy for her characters. Impervious to this resentful malice and absurd criticism, she continued making films such as A Joke of Destiny, Lying in Wait Around the Corner Like a Bandit, Summer Night, with Greek Profile, Almond Eyes and Scent of Basil, and Blood Feud for the European market.
Seven Beauties is perhaps the apex of Lina Wertm?ller?s body of work, featuring extraordinarily powerful images, a haunting musical score, and a tour-de-force acting accomplishment from the incomparable Giancarlo Giannini. It is indisputably a cinematic masterpiece, a film that can shift the psyche - a work of art that clings to memory long after the final images have faded from the screen.
?I simply thought. It?s the most atrocious crime a citizen could commit.?
Rating:
Summary: It forces one to ponder the future of our world society.
Review: One realizes more and more subtlies in the film with each viewing. While it is entertaining and even funny at times, it is a brooding work of art. The future is dim indeed since the film seems to be saying that physical survival at any cost may indeed result in spiritual and emotional death. Certainly one of the most powerful films ever made.
Rating:
Summary: Masterpiece !
Review: This film is so perfectly constructed and well acted that it should be required viewing in any film school. The use of flashback allows the action to switch from extremely funny scenes set in Naples to extremely grim depictions of life in a concentration camp. Giannini is absolutely brilliant as he struggles to maintain his exagerated sense of dignity under increasingly difficult circumstances. The concentration camp is potrayed as hell on earth- all darkness and forboding. Contrast this with colorful Naples and the liveliness of the residents. The film develops these contrasts in a way that focuses on the power of human endurance and the survival instinct. Giannini has an incredible ability to communicate the full range of human emotions with his eyes alone. A truly astounding and very funny performance. Possibly the best I've ever seen.
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