WOMAN TIMES SEVEN
Italy/US, 1967, 100 minutes, Colour.
Shirley Mac Laine, Alan Arkin, Rossano Brazzi, Michael Caine, Vittorio Gassman, Peter Sellers, Lex Barker, Adrienne Corri, Anita Ekberg, Elspeth March, Elsa Martinelli, Robert Morley, Philippe Noiret, Patrick Wymark.
Directed by Vittorio de Sica.
Woman Times Seven was written by Cesare Zavattini, the regular writer during the 40s and 50s for celebrated director Vittorio de Sica. Zavattini scripted such masterpieces as Bicycle Thieves, Shoe Shine, Miracle in Milan for de Sica.
During the 1960s de Sica made a number of portmanteau films like this but, especially with Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, Yesterday Today and Tomorrow and Marriage Italian Style. De Sica also pursued an acting career at this stage but directed another masterpiece in the 1970s, The Garden of the Finzi- Continis.
This film is a tour-de-force for Shirley Mac Laine who had been a film star for about a decade by the time this film was made. There are seven short stories of adultery and relationships: Funeral Procession, a widow at her husband’s funeral which is quite comic; Amateur Night when a wife becomes a prostitute in revenge against her husband; Two Against One with a very reserved girl who is not what she seems; Super Simone with a wife trying to distract her writer husband who is absorbed in his work; At the Opera, a difficulty about an allegedly exclusive dress; Suicides about a death pact and, finally, Snow where a suitor is a private detective who has been hired by the wife’s husband.
The film gives the opportunity for a variety of roles for Shirley Mac Laine who over the decades proved that she was adept at all kinds of films from musicals (Sweet Charity), comedy (with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis) to her Oscar-winning Terms of Endearment. During her 70s she still appeared to great advantage in such films as In Her Shoes.
1. What was the total impact of this film? Was it enjoyable?
2. The value of a short story on the screen? Audience response to short sketches? Audience response to a collection of short sketches? Audience response to Shirley Mac Laine and her virtuosity ad libbing these sketches
Was Shirley Mac Laine’s talent well used?
3. The importance of the content background of each of the stories? Slightly exotic? The nature of the comedy, the nature of the satire? The import of so many men as supporting Shirley Mac Laine? Audience response to such actors as Peter Sellers, Allan Arkin Michael Caine?
4. How was woman' the theme of the film? Was there much insight given into women? Was the film favourable towards women? Satirical at women's expense? Did it give insight into the role of modern woman?
5. The humour of the funeral sketch? The wife’s grief, the support from the Sellers’ character? Accent, the music, the satire of the couple veering away from the funeral? What point was being made?
6. The sequence of the ordinary wife returning happily and finding her husband unfaithful? The satire on such a women? The insight into her reaction? The nature of her shock? The importance of her meeting the prostitutes and understanding their way of life? What point was being made about women here? The contrast of wife and prostitute?
7. The wife of the novelist, her drab life, her wandering into fantasy, her trying to attract her husband? The satire on the husband as a novelist, as a man of imagination, yet very orderly in real life? The relationship between the two? The comment being made on the fantasy life of the ordinary women?
8. The point behind the mutual suicide sequence? The cliches of romance, the infidelity in the cliches, the motions of love, the satire in both of them running away from death?
9. The sequence of the jealous rich wife? And the dress? The satire on the society woman?
10. The encounter with the stranger? The satire on the fashionable women and their attracting strange men? And the theme of the women's esteem in her attractiveness?
11. What did the total of the sketches add up to as regards to insight and entertainment?
