General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Pasqualino Seven Beasts

Pasqualino Seven Beasts (Italian: Pasqualino Settebellezze, released internationally as Seven Beauties) is a 1975 Italian comedy-drama war film written, directed, and produced by Lina Wertmüller. It follows Pasqualino Frafuso, a petty Neapolitan criminal who commits murder to avenge his sister's honor, survives an asylum, the army, and a Nazi concentration camp, and pays a moral price for each act of self-preservation. At the 49th Academy Awards in 1977 it received four nominations, and Wertmüller became the first woman ever nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original / international title	Pasqualino Settebellezze / Seven Beauties (German: Sieben Schönheiten)¹^•³
Director and writer	Lina Wertmüller, her ninth feature film¹^•⁴
Country, year, runtime	Italy, 1975, 116 minutes¹
Italian release	20 December 1975; released in most other European countries in 1977–1978¹
Principal cast	Giancarlo Giannini (Pasqualino), Fernando Rey (the anarchist Pedro), Shirley Stoler (the camp commandant), Elena Fiore (Concettina)¹
Key crew	Cinematography Tonino Delli Colli; music Enzo Jannacci; editing Franco Fraticelli; producer Arrigo Colombo¹
Academy Awards	Four nominations at the 1977 ceremony: Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor, Best Foreign Language Film; no wins²
Historic first	Wertmüller was the first woman nominated for Best Director, and remained the only one until Jane Campion in 1994⁵

Spoilers

Plot

The film is set in Naples and during World War II. Pasqualino Frafuso, nicknamed "Settebellezze" (Seven Beauties) in ironic reference to his seven plain, overweight sisters, is a small-time criminal who lives off his sisters' earnings while claiming to defend the family honor at any cost.⁶ When a pimp turns his oldest sister into a prostitute, Pasqualino kills him, almost by accident, and pleads insanity at his trial.⁷

From there he passes through a series of institutions and ordeals: a criminal asylum, the Italian army, desertion, capture by German troops, and internment in a concentration camp.⁷ In the camp he survives by seducing the female commandant (Shirley Stoler), who then forces him to select six fellow prisoners for extermination and to shoot his best friend Francesco.⁸ The film is structured around flashbacks: it opens with Pasqualino fleeing through a German wood after escaping a train, and his reminiscences with Francesco carry the story of his earlier life in Italy.⁹

Themes and style

Wertmüller had already examined the sexual swagger of the Italian male in The Seduction of Mimi (1971); in Seven Beauties she places that theme in the wider setting of fascism and war.⁷ Pasqualino's obsession with honor is presented as a macho code that collapses the moment he faces someone stronger: the Cannes festival notes describe him as a "small household tyrant who turns out to be a dishonorable bastard when faced with those who are stronger than he is."⁴

Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun-Times critic and 1975 Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism, called the film "absorbing and mysterious" and observed that its uniqueness lies in Pasqualino being a fool rather than a hero, villain, or coward, a man who debases himself without ever having had dignity to fall from.⁸ The film mixes black humor with scenes of brutality; the Australian Centre for the Moving Image describes it as Wertmüller's "most wickedly subversive and audacious film," exposing the perversity of class relations through the interplay of fascism and machismo.¹⁰

The film's treatment of the concentration camp drew lasting controversy. The psychologist and Holocaust survivor Bruno Bettelheim attacked it for what he considered a fundamental falsification of the camp and of the psychology of survival, reframing the debate as an ethical rather than aesthetic one.¹¹ Scholars have also read the film's images of rape and sexual violence as writing the victim out of the narrative by shifting attention to the perpetrator's suffering.¹²

Production and release

The film was produced by Medusa, with Arrigo Colombo as producer, and was shot by Tonino Delli Colli with music by the singer-composer Enzo Jannacci.¹ It opened in Italy on 20 December 1975 and reached the United States in January 1976, distributed by Cinema 5.¹^•¹³ A New York Times reviewer concluded in 1976 that the film "deserves to become the first big success of the year."⁴

In 2019 the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia – Cineteca Nazionale restored the film from the original 35mm negative and its optical soundtrack negative, and the restoration was screened in the Cannes Classics section, where Wertmüller presented it with Giancarlo Giannini.⁴

Awards

At the 49th Academy Awards (1977) the film received four nominations: Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for Wertmüller, Best Actor in a Leading Role for Giannini, and Best Foreign Language Film for Italy. It won none.² Wertmüller's Best Director nomination was the first for a woman in the award's history; she remained the only woman so nominated until Jane Campion for The Piano in 1994, and the Cannes festival notes that her nomination paved the way for later nominees Sofia Coppola, Kathryn Bigelow, and Greta Gerwig.⁵^•⁴ The film was also nominated for the 1977 Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture – Non-English Language, placed third with the New York Film Critics Circle for Best Film, Best Director, and Best Screenplay in 1976, and earned Francesca Marciano an Italian Golden Goblet for Best New Actress.¹⁴^•²

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Black comedy and satire films › Released 1939 to 1997

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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