Der Tod trägt schwarzes Leder

The police ask for help: Giallo classic with Giovanna Ralli and Mario Adorf

That's not nice! The very young Silvia Polesi (SherryBuchanan) hanged herself in an attic where she always met her boyfriend for rendezvous. Since it is apparently a suicide, Inspector Valentini (really good: EUROPEAN FILM AWARD nominee Mario Adorf, who received a nomination for ROSSINI by Helmut DIETL in 1997) and the second public prosecutor Vittoria Stori (Giovanna Ralli) are responsible for the case. By chance, however, it turns out that a shady neighbor (Franco Fabrizi) has repeatedly taken photos of the girl with various male acquaintances. Suddenly everything points to murder. Commissario Silvestri (Claudio Cassinelli) is now in charge. At some point, Silvia's overly carefree parents (Marina Berti and Hitchcock star Farley Granger) return to Rome. The inspector finds out that Silvia was probably part of a prostitution ring for very young girls. What does her psychotherapist Professor Beltrame (Steffen Zacharias) have to do with it? And suddenly the murder really starts: a motorcyclist equipped with a cleaver is on the way. The whole thing comes to a head even more when it becomes clear that Valentini's underage daughter is also involved in the prostitution ring...

Things are quite tough here, with hands sometimes being abused with a cleaver. On the other hand, the issue of youth prostitution is dealt with surprisingly sensitively. As a result, this film by Massimo Dallamano (1917-1976) was able to set a style for future Gialli and Poliziotteschi, who then worked on the subject in a more sensational way. And then there is a really good female role for Giovanna Ralli (Era notte a Roma), which wasn't necessarily the norm in Italian genre films of the 1970s.

This skilful mix of Giallo and Poliziottesco is a must-see for any fan of Italian genre cinema!

Although the 'Giallo' genre officially began with Mario Bava's 'Ragazza Che Sapeva Troppo' (aka 'Evil Eye', or 'The Girl Who Knew To Much') in 1963, continuing with the same director's 'Sei Donne Per L'Assassino' ('Blood and Black Lace', 1964), it wasn't really until the commercial success of Dario Argento's 1969 debut, 'L'Uccello dalle Piuma di Cristallo' ('The Bird With the Crystal Plumage') that it really got underway to become a staple of Italian cinema in the 1970's. The films essentially were bloody thrillers in which the primary thrill was in watching pretty young girls being stalked and dispatched by anonymous, leather-gloved assassins. Stylistically these films forced the audience to identify with the killer, featuring lengthily protracted and elaborately staged sequences of women in terror strung together by a convoluted whodunnit plot along the lines of those of early twentieth century British crime-writer Edgar Wallace.

In fact, director Massimo Dallamano's previous film, 'Whatever Happened to Solange?' ('Cosa Avete Fatto a Solange?' 1972) was based on an Edgar Wallace novel. The follow-up takes it's cue from the same film by also setting itself within a girl's school, giving us a whole host of young nubiles around which to build the plot. The film opens with a rousing score courtesy of Stelvio Cipriani, a big-band romp through 70's flower-power accompanied by shots of the young girls getting on and off of their boyfriends scooters outside the school gates. This is followed by the discovery by the police of a young girl swinging naked from the rafters of an attic in a nearby deserted house after an anonymous tip off.

As the Italian title 'La Polizia Chiede Aiuto' (The Police Ask For Help) suggests, and what sets this apart from its predecessor and most of the Giallo films of the period, is that a lot of time is devoted to the police's detective work and the milieu of the police themselves as opposed to those of the potential victims, bringing the film more in line with the policier drama than pure 'Giallo'. For the most part the film follows these investigations from suspect to suspect, with each plot point highlighted by a lengthy flashback. A motorcycle chase forms one of the action set-pieces alongside the usual suspense scenes, including a taut sequence in which the female detective (Giovanni Ralli) is stalked by the leather-clad, helmeted killer with a meat cleaver. The gorier pay-offs mainly occur towards the end, once the cleaver has made its initial appearance, but along the way we discover a mutilated body in the back of a car, and the blood spattered bath in which it was dismembered.

If all this sounds rather perfunctory so far, it is the sheer bleakness of the film that distinguishes it. The initial murder is linked to the discovery of a school girl prostitution ring, and this central concept pretty much summarises the whole tone of the film. With a potential political scandal hinted at, and a scene in which the Claudio Casinelli's police investigator lies to the press to buy more time, the general milieu invoked is a corrupt and sordid one, where corruption and vice are masked by the superficially angelic innocence of the girls involved. The deadpan and po-faced narrative includes lengthy scenes of the police listening intently and repeatedly to tapes made of the call-girls' meetings, and graphic post-mortem descriptions of the victims. Salacious tit-bits like these are so deeply engrained within the complex plot that forces one is forced into a particularly bizarre and twisted perspective of the world by the accumulation of such elements.

Director Dallamano was a cinematographer turned director who had worked on a number of spaghetti Westerns in the 60's including Sergio Leone's 'Per un pugno di dollari' ('Fistful of Dollars', 1964). Prior to this he had made a number of films including adaptations of Oscar Wilde's 'Dorian Gray' (1970) and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's 'Venus in Furs' ('Le Malizie de Venere', 1969)

'La Polizia Chiede Aiuto' also sports features an undistinguished supporting role from former Stranger on a Train, Farley Granger (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951). It is competently made, fast moving and gripping in places. It's worth checking out, but a maybe a little too serious in both its sleazy theme and its approach to prove a major crowd pleaser.

This movie's pretty blunt and straight to the point, so I can keep it brief.

What Have They Done to Your Daughters? Is an Italian crime/horror movie that follows a group of characters trying to catch a serial killer who's targeting teenage girls. It's the kind of premise that's been done to death, but it's the way it's done here that's interesting. It's fast-paced, surprisingly well-shot, memorably bloody, and also features some great music. In fact, it's the music that cancels out the bad dubbing, really, because while most Italian movies from this time don't have very good dubbing, this one kind of goes one step beyond, because it's really bad at points.

I can see these crime/horror/thriller movies from Italy in the 1970s being the next genre I hyper-fixate on, as I've done with kaiju movies, samurai movies, and martial arts movies. There's something really interesting about them (I'd call them Giallo movies, but I'm not entirely sure yet whether this particular movie counts as Giallo).

So overall, What Have They Done to Your Daughters? Isn't anything new when it comes to its story or characters, and it's kind of sleazy in parts, but it's well-made and consistently engaging, making it a pleasant surprise to watch, because I wasn't expecting this to be of a moderately high quality.

A school-girl is found hung naked in a loft. Initially thought suicide, it soon becomes clear it was a murder. The discovery leads to a sordid case involving an underage prostitute ring and bloody mutilation.

What Have They Done to Your Daughters? is pretty much a companion piece to director Massimo Dallamano's other similarly themed film What Have You Done to Solange? Both movies share stories about murder and abuse of school-girls. As a result they both are a little more downbeat than is usual in this category of film, they aren't as graphically violent as other similar movies either, as the bleak story lines are unpleasant enough as they are. Where Solange was a giallo, this film is a hybrid of the giallo and poliziotteschi; for while there is a murder-mystery plot, the emphasis is squarely on the police procedural side of things. To be fair though this is an excellent show-case for both Italian sub-genres. From the poliziotteschi side of things we have a brilliantly shot and pulse-pounding motorcycle chase scene where a leather clad killer is pursued through the streets by police in a high speed chase; alternatively from the giallo side of the coin there is an intensely suspenseful scene set in an underground car-park where the killer stalks the heroine. In other words what makes Dallamano's film so good is that he is so adept at delivering the goods in both sub-genres.

The two leads are very good. Giovanni Ralli (Cold Eyes of Fear) and Claudio Cassinelli (Flavia the Heretic) as both believable and strong in their respective roles as the police in pursuit of the killer. To accompany things nicely is a very good score from Stelvio Cipriani; it accentuates the suspense moments to a significant degree and surely must be one of his best soundtracks. As you may also expect, it's photographed very well too. So stylistically this is a strong feature but what elevates it more is the unexpectedly serious-minded tone and story which also comments on political corruption. Its cynicism and downbeat nature are mediated, however, with more typical gruesome touches such as a man having his hand hacked off and an autopsy scene involving a torso cut into many pieces.

I've got to recommend this one to my fellow Italian genre enthusiasts. It's the best combination of the giallo and poliziotteschi I am aware of. Its mystery is consistently compelling and it's directed with considerable skill. Well worth tracking down.

From the director of the excellent what have you done to Solange, Massimo Dallamano, here is a strange Italian giallo, more a police procedural (an a really lurid tale, a ring of teens used as prostitutes by people in very high places - that was the time, in Italy, when several directors and scripwriters tried their hands on very hot subjects, like this one) than an Argentian thriller (but it is scary enough in a few places and also very gory). It starts with the false suicide of a very young girl, hanged nude under a roof and then proceeds with a lot of cars and bikes chases (the killer is always covered by a motorcycle helmet until the very end - it is possible that the director of Night School took from here the idea of the killer masked with an helmet), almost always running without pauses. Tense and scary enough, good almost till the end (a lot too Dillenger for my tastes).