I saw this with an Italian friend who was struck by the stilted speech, which she said was obviously deliberate. My hope is that Lina Wertmüller's characters spoke, as would have been apt, like people in a Jack Vance novel, but I wouldn't know, since none of the stylised quality of her dialogue, whatever that quality was, came across in the English subtitles. For better or worse English speakers will see a more ordinary movie than the one Wertmüller made.
It's not bad even in its ordinary form. The deep focus, Academy ratio photography is excellent. It looks very much like a Hollywood film from the late 1940s with the same plot would have looked had such films been in colour. And without the one or two touches of nudity such a film could easily have been made then: a brisk saga of commerce, passion, honour, loyalty and grudges, high-flung yet easy to take seriously enough to care about the characters; it's the kind of thing which (especially in 1940s movies) gets called "melodrama" even though there MUST be a better word for it, since it really has nothing in common with the musty, overacted theatre pieces to which the term was originally applied.
After an enjoyable two hours you sort of wonder whether there's any point to the story other than the sequence of events of which it consists, or not. But this is less of a serious worry with this film than it was with, say, "Mildred Pierce".
