"THE FEMALE," the New York Daily News said, "makes I A Woman look like Mary Poppins." In truth, it make Last Year at Marienbad look like The Great Escape.

Not that there isn't anything to recommend it. There are unusual effects--like subtitles when nobody's speaking and (you figure the director wanted to be fair) no subtitles when the characters are talking up a storm.

But the plot is thin. It's about this female, Lora, played by a well-developed Italian girl named Isabel Sarli, who has the sexiest way of standing over her husband and her love after she has left them at the bottom of a hole. The men have spent most of the film digging--looking for water they say. In fact they spent so much time digging it that a kid sitting behind me left halfway through, groaning under his breath, "that's just one shovel-full too many."

After Lora leaves the two men to die, she goes to the city where she becomes a hardened prostitute. But a hole in the ceiling of her working-room (like the hole her lover and husband were digging, get it?) reminds her of her misdeed and she can't be a good prostitute. Her madam often casts scowering looks at Lora, and tells her to "work like the other girls or get out." A whorehouse, very obviously, is not a home.

The hole in the ceiling leads to a flashback of her whole horrible life--from when she first ran off with her husband, through when her love attempted to make love to her while her husband was sleeping right next to her, to when she left them both at the bottom of the hole.

All of which might have made a vert nice fifteen or twenty minute flick, but an hour and a half is ridiculous. Other things that are bad about the movie are the music (which comes in with the subtlety of a napalm raid), the dialogue (such conversations as "Winter is so long." "And summer is so short." "That is because in the summer we are so busy preparing for the winter."), and the acting, which, by any standards, is quite poor.

The Esquire was supposed to begin a Psychedelic Underground Festival this week, "but due to circumstances beyond our control," a friendly recording tells you, the Festival has been cancelled. That's too bad. Because nothing could have been worse than The Female.