Nominated for four Academy Awards including Best Director, Seven Beauties stars Giancarlo Giannini (Swept Away) as Pasqualino Frafuso, known in Naples, Italy as "Pasqualino Seven Beauties". A petty thief who lives off of the profits of his seven sisters while claiming to protect their honor at any cost, Pasqualino kills the pimp who made his sister a prostitute, chops up his body and mails the pieces to different locations across the country. He is then arrested and later sent to fight in the army after committing sexual assault. The Germans capture him and he gets sent to a concentration camp where he plots to make his escape by attempting to seduce a German officer.

In the 1970s, when you talked about women directors, there was only one name, it seemed, in the whole world: Italy's Lina Wertmüller. She hit her peak with this 1976 effort, starring the basset-eyed Giancarlo Giannini. He plays a small-time hustler in World War II Italy whose fate seems tied to his seven ugly sisters, whom he must support; hence, his nickname, "Seven Beauties." But he learns that he doesn't know the beginning of trouble when he winds up in a German concentration camp. There, he does whatever it takes to stay alive--including making love to the camp's colossal commandant (Shirley Stoler). Wertmüller's outrageous humor goes farther than that, including a wild sequence in which Giannini tries to dispose of a dead body that's been dismembered and packed into suitcases. Harrowingly funny and touching--Wertmüller, the first woman ever nominated for an Oscar as best director for this film, was never able to match it. --Marshall Fine