ABSTRACT
While it might be said that Lina Wertmüller's films have left the critics somewhat indifferent over the last fifteen years, this was not the case dur ing the 1970s, when any new release by the Italian director was sure to provoke passionate debates ranging from dithyrambic praise to virulent anathema. It was in 1976, after the American première of her film Pasqualino Settebellezze (Seven Beauties), that the director would ignite a major contro versy. For some she became the equal of the greatest film directors over night, the one whom, from then on, a mocking Roman journalist called: "Santa Lina di New York."1 For others, she was nothing but a reactionary misogynist whose aesthetics were rather conventional.2 Such extreme re actions are in perfect accord with the carnivalesque logic of a filmic world in which the filmmaker is all too eager to debase the sacred and the reli gious while elevating the lower and the vulgar through the use of comedy.
