THE SEDUCTION OF MIMI 50th Anniversary Screenings March 2, at the Royal, Playhouse, Glendale & Newhall.
To launch our Anniversary Classics Series in 2022, and during Oscar season, we celebrate the first woman ever to be nominated for Best Director, Lina Wertmüller, who died at the end of last year at the age of 93. Just two years earlier, she had won an honorary Oscar at the Academy’s annual Governors Awards for her sterling body of work, spanning more than 50 years. For our Anniversary screening, we are presenting one of the first movies that brought her to the world’s attention, The Seduction of Mimi.
Wertmüller had served an apprenticeship with the great Federico Fellini, and she began directing her own films in the 1960s. When she presented The Seduction of Mimi at the Cannes Film Festival in 1972, she won widespread acclaim. Mimi and the director’s subsequent film, Love and Anarchy, were both released in the United States in 1974, and the press and the public took notice. The following year she scored an even bigger success with the controversial Swept Away, and in 1976 her unique World War II drama, Seven Beauties, earned four Oscar nominations, including two for Wertmüller, for Best Screenplay as well as Best Director. This historic nomination of a female director was not repeated until 1993 when Jane Campion earned a nod for The Piano.
In The Seduction of Mimi, Wertmüller’s favorite leading man, Giancarlo Giannini, plays a laborer torn between the Mafia and the Communist Party. As he travels from Sicily to Rome, he also gets involved with several women in addition to his wife. One of his lovers is played by another of Wertmüller’s favorite actors, Mariangela Melato, who co-starred with Giannini in Love and Anarchy and Swept Away as well as Mimi. Giannini’s other co-stars in The Seduction of Mimi include Elena Fiore and Agostina Belli.
Writing in The New York Times, Nora Sayre said, “the politics and sex are so well balanced that all the raw emotions and the devastating jokes ring true.” Sayre added, “The Seduction of Mimi is one of the best films of this season.” The Los Angeles Free Press declared, “Wertmüller is a supreme satirist.”

This 50th anniversary screening will play at four Laemmle locations: the Royal in West Los Angeles, the Playhouse in Pasadena, Glendale and Newhall.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytGPSC35SfI
Moviegoers, start your guesses: The Umpteenth Annual Laemmle Oscar Contest has begun.
The Oscar nominations are out, and in spite of the fact that Bradley Cooper was robbed of one and possibly even two nominations, it’s time for our Umpteenth Annual Laemmle Oscar Contest! Correctly guess how the Academy will vote and win movie passes good at all Laemmle venues and Laemmle Virtual Cinema.
Oscar Update: Contests, KStew, Sleepers from India and Bhutan, Plus Doc, Animated and Live Action Shorts!
Please note: this year neither the animated nor live action short programs are appropriate for children.
Anniversary Classics Abroad Returns with Wertmüller, Almodóvar, Truffaut and more.
With the fifth wave of the pandemic fading, we’re ready to restart Anniversary Classics Abroad, our repertory series of great foreign films. First up is the raucous sex comedy THE SEDUCTION OF MIMI. A tribute to Lina Wertmüller, who recently passed away and was the first female director to be nominated by the Academy, the film provides the best medicine, copious laughter. We’ll follow that up with Almodóvar’s TALK TO HER, Truffaut’s JULES & JIM and the Liv Ullmann-Max von Sydow drama THE EMIGRANTS. We are planning eight more films for the rest of 2022, titles to be announced!
03/02/22 – THE SEDUCTION OF MIMI
03/23/22 – TALK TO HER
04/13/22 – JULES & JIM
05/11/22 – THE EMIGRANTS
We’ll screen them all at our Glendale, Newhall, Pasadena and West L.A. theaters.
Reminder: Submit your 2021 Top Ten Movie List for a chance to win fabulous prizes (gift cards)!
Tell us your favorite ten films of 2021 for a chance to win a Gift Card valid at all eight Laemmle locations and at home on watch.laemmle.com! The deadline for submission is February 21, 2022.
For inspiration, here’s Greg Laemmle’s Top 10 list:
Greg Laemmle: “Now is the time to show that arthouse audiences still want to support the theatrical experience.”
Michael Ordona’s piece in today’s L.A. Times Calendar section — headlined “Movie theater safety during COVID, the sequel: This time it’s personal” —
and the latest newsletter from the National Association of Theatre Owners got Laemmle Theatres President Greg Laemmle thinking about the state of American arthouse exhibition:
“In addition to #CinemaSafe measures, Laemmle Theatres is providing a one-seat lateral buffer even though this is not required. You never have to share an armrest with someone who isn’t part of your party. And in addition to the distancing benefit, the reduced capacity also likely enhances the ability of the ventilation system to clear the air.
“For those who are vaxxed and boosted, there’s arguably a greater risk to one’s health in driving to the theatre than the likelihood of getting sick from an infection acquired while in the theatre (or other “regular” activity). And that’s not me saying that. See journalist David Leonhardt’s quote in the New York Times daily email for January 25, 2022:
“It’s a remarkable disconnect between perception and reality. A majority of the boosted say they are worried about getting sick from Covid. In truth, riding in a car presents more danger to most of them than the virus does.”
“If people want to wait another week or two to let numbers continue to drop, I can’t argue with that. But with Oscar nominations coming on February 8, and absent a new variant, now is the time to show that arthouse audiences still want to support the theatrical experience. With that show of support, distributors will feel confident that movie theatres are back for all audiences and all types of films. Without that show of support, you can expect a future where going to a movie theatre is just for blockbusters like SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME.”
Learn more about Laemmle Theatres’ health and safety measures to combat the pandemic here.
Author and film critic Stephen Farber on Peter Bogdanovich: “Although he was a lover of old Hollywood, he saw the blemishes as well as the triumphs; he was a most clear-eyed observer.”
“All film lovers were saddened by the passing of director Peter Bogdanovich last week, but I may have felt it a bit more keenly. Peter joined us for an Anniversary Classics screening of The Last Picture Show in December of 2016 at the Fine Arts Theatre, and he shared incisive memories about the making of the movie and about many of his other encounters with Hollywood legends over the decades. We were all impressed with how well his film held up after 45 years. As many people commented, it didn’t seem dated at all. The evocation of a dying Texas town in the early 1950s remained incisive and poignant.

“That was not my first encounter with Bogdanovich. I first met him when I was a graduate student at UCLA film school in the late 1960s and he taught a class on Howard Hawks, one of his friends and idols. I remember we got into a bit of an argument when I suggested that Hawks’ To Have and Have Not was not quite as original as he claimed but might have owed something to Casablanca, which came out a couple of years earlier and was directed by non-auteur Michael Curtiz. Anyway, Peter cheerfully dismissed my criticisms. Around the same time, I saw his first film, Targets, which impressed me greatly. Its portrayal of a mass shooter was way ahead of its time, and this story was welded skillfully to an inside-Hollywood tale starring the legendary Boris Karloff in one of his last screen performances. After that came The Last Picture Show and two other huge hits, What’s Up, Doc? and Paper Moon. We are hoping to pay tribute to Peter with a 50th Anniversary screening of Doc this year.
“Not all of his later movies were as successful, but he continued working productively, and he also scored successes as an actor and as a film historian. His books of interviews with directors and actors were enormously valuable to all film students and film lovers.
“In the 50 years between that UCLA class and the screening of The Last Picture Show, I encountered Peter on several occasions, and he was always warm and engaging. When I was writing a story about Cher in the 1990s, he shared some incisive memories of directing her in Mask, even though he spoke quite candidly about the tensions between them. Although he was a lover of old Hollywood, he saw the blemishes as well as the triumphs; he was a most clear-eyed observer. Hollywood did not always treat him any better than it treated some of his idols, like his good friend Orson Welles, but he survived to tell the tales, and he never surrendered to bitterness. I feel fortunate to have known him and to have shared a stage with him at that memorable anniversary screening five years ago.”
~ Stephen Farber was president of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association from 2012-2016. He is currently a critic for The Hollywood Reporter, a curator of Laemmle’s Anniversary Classics series and co-author of Cinema ’62: The Greatest Year at the Movies.
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