What Have They Done To Your Daughters?, 1974.
Directed by Massimo Dallamano.
Starring Giovanna Ralli, Claudio Cassinelli, Mario Adorf, Franco Fabrizi, Farley Grange.
SYNOPSIS:
A police inspector and a district attorney investigate the apparent suicide of a teenage girl, and uncover something a lot darker.
What Have They Done To Your Daughters? is a dark and twisted mystery thriller that straddles the boundary between giallo and poliziotteschi and delves deep into the murky world of child prostitution, and given that this was made in Italy in the 1970s, on paper it reads like the kind of movie where you need to have a shower after watching.
However, for an Italian movie from the 1970s with such salacious material in its script, What Have They Done To Your Daughters? is a surprisingly restrained and, for use of a better word, mature entry into the giallo genre. Don’t despair, though, for there is plenty of what you come to these movies to see, but director Massimo Dallamano handles everything with a tactful hand (and eye) to keep the sleaze at an acceptable level, given the subject matter.
The movie begins with the police – led by Inspector Valentini (Mario Dorf) and newly appointed district attorney Vittoria Stori (Giovanna Ralli) – bursting into a room where a naked 15-year-old girl has hanged herself, or has she? Upon investigation it appears that she may have been placed there by somebody else, for the autopsy reveals – in a somewhat sensationalist way – that she had “..traces of sperm in the vagina, the anus and the stomach.”
After the girl’s identity is revealed, sickened Valentini – who has a teenage daughter – hands the case over to Inspector Silvestri (Claudio Cassinelli), who goes to question the girl’s lover, but he has a rock solid alibi as he has been underground spelunking for the previous few days, and so the investigation widens to find out who else the girl had been sleeping with. Soon, Silvestri and Stori are in above their heads as process of elimination leads them to an underground child sex ring and a killer who is rather handy with a meat cleaver.
And so it is that the rest of the movie centres around the two main characters (and a few of their colleagues) as each lead they follow reveals a little more and they become the victims of a motorcycle-riding, meat cleaver-wielding maniac, clad in black leather (of course) and not worried about who they maim. As stated previously, the movie is relatively restrained for the most part, but when the script calls for it there is plenty of the red stuff splashing about as skulls get split, the cleaver gets thrown like a throwing knife and one unfortunate soul gets all his fingers chopped off in one hit as he turns on a light switch. Before that, one victim gets sliced up and his wife has to identify him in the morgue by his severed body pieces placed on the slab.
But the gore isn’t the controversial issue here, as the sensitive issue of child exploitation is the main plot thread and it is handled well. Visually, the only representation of the seedier aspects of the story is the body of the hanging girl, which is clearly a mannequin and not a real person, and that is just in the opening scene, quickly lambasted by D.A. Stori when the papers publish the image on their front pages the next day, saying they shouldn’t have shown her naked body. All of the other references to sexual abuse are audio, as the police listen to recordings of dirty old men giving their victims orders, which is still very disturbing but is all you need, rather than being shown what was going on behind closed doors.
No doubt there were some filmmakers of the time who would have shown it to some degree, but Massimo Dallamano – a visual filmmaker if ever there was one, as he was a famed cinematographer – chose not to, preferring to show off his talents with the camera in other ways, as What Have They Done To Your Daughters? is impeccably shot and looks fabulous in terms of framing and its use of handheld cameras.
If anything, What Have They Done To Your Daughters? doesn’t really have the explosive ending you hope for, given the tense and sometimes shocking build-up, but it does have one of the jauntiest scores for a giallo, so there is that. As with many movies of this ilk, there are political and social undertones at play within the script – Inspector Silvestri seems to delight in reminding D.A. Stori that she is a woman, although this is played on once she has put him right and the two have a bit of a chemistry after that – but you can choose not to see them and just go along with what you are being presented with. And what you are presented with is a tense and exciting (for the most part) Euro-crime thriller that handles its difficult and challenging subject matter in a way that suggests somebody behind the scenes was at least trying to make something with a bit of substance and not be quite so sleazy, and it works.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Chris Ward
