1960s After her years spent touring with an avant-garde puppet group, Wertmüller began to pursue a career in film. In the early 1960s,
Flora Carabella, a school friend, introduced Wertmüller to her husband, the actor
Marcello Mastroianni, who in turn introduced her to the film director
Federico Fellini, who became her mentor. '' (1963) Although
The Lizards, which was scored by
Ennio Morricone, was critically well received, it did not garner the level of attention her later works did. Throughout the 1960s, Wertmüller produced a series of films that were well liked but that failed to garner international success. Of these, her first collaboration with
Giancarlo Giannini occurred in 1966's musical comedy
Rita the Mosquito. Darragh O'Donoghue wrote in
Cineaste that generally "her early films comprise a fairly straight pastiche of
neorealism and early Fellini (
The Lizards, 1963), an episodic comedy, two musicals, and a
Spaghetti Western (
The Belle Starr Story, 1968, directed under the pseudonym Nathan Wich), works where knowledge of generic predecessors was essential".
1970s The 1970s saw the release of virtually all of Wertmüller's most influential and highly regarded films, many of which featured Giannini. According to Geoffrey Nowell-Smith's
Companion to Italian Cinema, 1972 "marked the beginning of Wertmüller's golden age". Beginning in 1972 with
The Seduction of Mimi, and continuing until 1978 with
Blood Feud, Wertmüller released seven films, many of which are considered masterpieces of
Commedia all'italiana. It was during this time she saw critical and international success, gaining traction as a filmmaker outside of Italy and in the United States on a scale that many of her contemporaries were unable to attain. '' In 1975, the
National Board of Review in the United States awarded
Swept Away Top Foreign Film, and in 1976, Wertmüller became the first female director to be nominated for an Oscar, for
Seven Beauties. This film, which again features Giannini in the lead role, pushes Wertmüller's specific brand of
tragic comedy to its limits, following a self-obsessed Casanova from a small Italian town who is sent to a German
concentration camp. The film initially met with controversy due to Wertmüller's frankness in her rendering of the apparatuses of
genocide as well as her perceived
macabre insensitivity toward its survivors, but since has been accepted as her masterwork. Wertmüller then signed a contract with
Warner Bros. to make four films. The first was her first English-language film,
A Night Full of Rain, which was entered into the
28th Berlin International Film Festival in 1978. The film was not a success and Warner canceled the contract. and
Camorra (A Story of Streets, Women and Crime) was entered into the
36th Berlin International Film Festival in 1986. In 1985, she received the
Women in Film Crystal Award for outstanding women who have helped to expand the role of women within the entertainment industry. After this period of acclaim, Wertmüller began to fade from international prominence, though she continued to release films well into the 1980s and '90s. Some of these films were sponsored by American financiers and studios, but failed to have the breadth of reach that her 1970s films achieved. These films are less widely seen and were neglected or disparaged by most, but
Summer Night (1986) and
Ferdinando & Carolina (1999) have since improved in reputation.
Ciao, Professore (1992) is one of her few films of this period that was relatively well-received as the number 10 film in Italy that year. == Later life ==