Reviewed By Sean Patrick Dolan
Year:  1972
Director:  Massimo Dallamano
Cast:  Fabio Testi, Cristina Galbo, Karin Baal, Joachim Fuchsberger, Camille Keaton


A Catholic Girls School in London.  A series of young women brutally murdered, the blade left protruding from between their legs. A lecherous professor who is having an affair with his student. A mysterious bearded priest who takes the girls' confessions. A secret which binds a group of girls together, who know more than they are willing to confide in the police.  This is a film of dark motives and concealment, with the net of suspicion cast wide enough to leave plenty of shadows for the guilty to hide in.

Henry Rossini (Fabio Testi) is a ladies' man, a handsome young Italian professor at Catholic Girls School.  He is having an affair with one of his upper form students, Elizabeth (Christina Galbo), which he take little pains to conceal from his wife, Herta (Karin Baal), who is also a professor at the school.  Elizabeth inadvertently catch a glimpse of the first murder while on an afternoon make out session with Rossini on the banks of the Thames.  Rossini takes this as either an attempt to forestall her deflowering or a case of pure imagination, and does not believe her.  When he hears of the murder on the radio the next morning he is shocked, and hurries to go and see the crime scene before he is due at the school.  His quick arrival at the crime scene, as well as a dropped pen there quickly make him the prime suspect in Commissioner Barth's (Joachim Fuchsberger) investigation.  Not wanting to have his sordid affair aired publicly, Rossini is uncooperative in the investigation.  He is also able to convince Elizabeth to keep it under wraps, saying that it would hurt the school's reputation. 

However, Rossini does not remain a suspect for long.  Another girl, Janet, is murdered. After waking from a nightmare, Elizabeth remembers another image from the day of the murder- the killer was wearing a habit like that of a priest.  She hears of Janet's murder and cannot keep silent any longer.  After confiding this new information to the faculty, who pass it on to the police, Elizabeth is murdered the next night.  Rossini is released and no longer a suspect after hair samples from under the dead girl's fingernails do not match his own.  In fact the hair is dead, which suggests that it must have come from a fake beard. The investigation is now focused on finding the mysterious bearded priest.

After Commissioner Barth tells Herta that Elizabeth's autopsy showed that she was still a virgin, it is much easier for her to forgive her wayward husband.  The Rossini's make up and decide to work together to catch the killer.  Commissioner Barth talks to Herta's class, and the girls say that an unfamiliar bearded priest did receive their confessions at Janet's funeral.  Herta makes the real breakthrough though, when she discovers that several of the girls, Brenda and Helene, are a tight knit clique and seem to be holding back information, specifically about their friends' murders- Janet and Elizabeth were also in their group. 

Rossini goes to investigate one of the older university boys the girls have been dating, Philip Solomon, and discovers that the girls were all "turned on chicks" who liked to go to sex and drug parties- or at least they used to, until after what happened to Solange... Not content with this cryptic remark, Rossini presses the issue, but all he can get out of the young punk is that Solange was half-French and in the first form at school last year.  Rossini searches throughout the city trying to find this mysterious girl, with no luck- none of the school registers list a student named Solange.  Another murder occurs, this time not a young girl but a middle aged woman, Ruth Holden.  The clique denies ever having heard of this woman, but Barth catches them in a lie- Holden was Helene's maid her entire childhood.  He has the girls watched and followed, and this leads to the inevitable plot twists and shocking conclusion, whereby the killer and his motive are at last revealed in high dramatic fashion.

This is a superlative giallo, which embodies both the themes and style that have made the genre so popular, and downright addictive to some.  The origin of this tale is a suspense thriller written by Edgar Wallace, an early twentieth century British author credited with the most movie adaptations of his work of any twentieth century authors.  His novels are not technically giallos, being written across the Channel in a different era.  But, in the hands of director Massimo Dallamano and cinematographer Joe D'Amato, this film acquires the sordid imagery and graphic sexual violence which characterize the giallo and gives all its fans our not-so-cheap thrills.  The giallo is not a genre which the viewer cannot watch safely removed from the action- as voyeuristic participants in the grisly happenings, we are complicit in the crimes themselves.  The victims, as always, are beautiful young women who are seemingly innocent of any wrongdoing.  Their deaths, which involved a ritualized pattern, do not sit well with modern and largely secular humanistic views of the world, but rather evoke pagan rites of our collective past.  I feel that it is this discomfort which causes those that condemn films like these to use the convenient and catchall phrase "misogynistic" to write them off without dwelling into more disturbing and telling analysis. 

The plot here is relatively linear for a giallo, with the exception of the murderer and his motive  which are of course removed from the chronology.  Like most giallos, there is little chance of guessing either the identity of the fiend or his motive, and in fact the title itself does not make sense until near the end of the film.  Both of these are common elements, and fans of the genre learn to live with them, if not to cherish them.  This is, as I mentioned, a film about dark secrets and concealment- it is also a tale of lust, thwarted innocence, and brutal revenge. While the viewer knows that Henry Rossini cannot be the murderer (as he is a secondary witness to the first crime), he remains the main suspect for the first half of the film.  He has transgressed against one of the fundamental social norms of Western society- an older man does not enter into a sexual relationship with a younger woman, especially if he is her teacher or otherwise has authority over her (the drawn out scandal of Clinton and the intern attests to the fact that this is still a part of our culture).  Rossini does appear sleazy at first, when he mocks young Elizabeth for not going all the way the day they witness the murder, and when he professes that he loves her, but just can't break it to his wife yet.  He is later vindicated when he does seem to show genuine love and concern for the girl, but she is then murdered soon after. 

To me his character seems oddly and callously unmoved by the death of a woman he claimed to love and was eventually going to end his marriage over, aside from the fact that he does desire to find her killer.  But when viewing this film from a broader perspective this motif makes sense- his relationship with Elizabeth was "unnatural" by societies standards, and thus she was expendable and doomed to die.  Rossini then is able to reunite with his wife, who immediately forgives him when she learns that his adulterous relationship was never consummated, and become an official representative of morality and a "hero" who will help solve the case.  This reconciles a character whose actions were seemingly all over the place throughout the film. From here on out the typical giallo device of the amateur sleuths doing the legwork for the police carries out the rest of the film.

What follows is yet another morality tale, that of the clique of schoolgirls and the disastrous results of their illicit extracurricular activities.  The killer's motive is ultimately revealed:  his daughter became pregnant as a result of sex/drug parties with older boys, and was forced by the other girls to have an abortion (performed by Ruth Holden, the lone victim who was not a nubile young woman), which in turn drove her out of her mind. I find it interesting that while many giallos subvert the role of the sexes and often blend them (Tenebrae, Bird With the Crystal Plumage, Blood and Black Lace and other examples too many to cite), this film takes the traditional formula which has been done over and over since the beginning of time and carries on to this day in more modern horror films (Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream, for example)- sex and drugs (or any other behavior generally frowned upon, especially when undertaken by females) equal punishment and death.  Nonetheless, the film is still effective as a giallo, as this is the only element it lacks.

From a stylistic point of view, the movie is beautifully done.  The Catholic School setting and the "priest" hearing confessions and later punishing his victims give this an almost gothic atmosphere, which lends itself well to the giallo.  The killer is shown in glimpses of a hand or a shadowy figure, always lurking in the shadows, or peeping through a hole into the girl's locker room (as well as through the screen of the confessional), always present but always obscured.  The murders themselves are brutal and graphic, although not as graphic as some entries in the genre.  The sleaze factor is turned up with the victims stripped naked before their deaths, as well as other nude scenes, including the aforementioned shower scene in the locker.  I cannot emphasize enough that as is often the case in the giallo, the viewer is made a voyeur through the eyes of the killer.  Faithful as always to the genre, the conclusion occurs only after a series of plot twists, and is meant to shock the viewer- it delivers.

What Have They Done To Solange? Is a veritable "Who's Who?" of Italian cinema.  The director Massimo Dallamano (What Have They Done To Our Daughters?, A Black Veil For Lisa, Dorian Gray) got his start the same way other Italian maestros have- by working as a cinematographer for established directors.  Like Dario Argento, Dallamano worked with legendary Spaghetti Western director Sergio Leone, on films such as Fistful of Dollars and For A Few Dollars More.  The cinematographer who worked on What Have They Done to Solange? was Joe D'Amato.  He, in turn, went on to direct a handful of excellent horror films (Buio Omega, Anthropophagus 2) as well as numerous sexploitation flicks (Emmanuelle, Erotic Nights of The Living Dead) and a truly remarkable number of hardcore porno movies, under an equally impressive number of pseudonyms.  I suspect he was responsible for the gratuitous nudity and brutal slayings in Solange.  The soundtrack to this film and it's haunting theme song were composed by Ennio Morricone, whose work has been featured in numerous giallos (Argento's and Fulci's among them), Leone's Spaghetti Westerns, and countless other films of various genres and nationalities which are  far too many to list.  Nowhere and at no other time in cinema has the "incestuous" relationship between a few handful of talented key players been so effective in producing great films as it was in this film and other Italian films of this era ('60's and '70's in particular).  In yet another odd twist of fate, Camille Keaton, who plays the beautiful but irreparably damaged Solange went on to star in one of the most notorious exploitation films of all time, I Spit On Your Grave, in which she plays a woman who is brutally gang raped yet goes on to exact bloody violent revenge on her violators. I think the connection there is obvious; as a grown woman the Solange character is stronger and able to exact revenge on her own without a male figure to do it on her behalf.

. . . I think the connection there is obvious; as a grown woman the Solange character is stronger and able to exact revenge on her own without a male figure to do it on her behalf.

I highly recommend this film to all fans of the genre.  Newcomers may also enjoys this as an introduction to the giallo, as it is relatively fast paced at 103 minutes and the acting is above average.  The familiar moral patterns and motifs I discussed above render this film more familiar and accessible to new viewers than other more complex (but not necessarily superior) giallos.  As a matter of fact, I think you could enjoy this film without even having heard the term "giallo".

I reviewed the recent 2002  Media Blasters (Shriek Show) DVD release, part of their "Giallo Collection" which includes a digitally re-mastered, uncut, widescreen presentation of the film.  It also includes a nice press-style booklet detailing the careers of the main players that made this great film, a 16 scene chapter index, the film's original trailor (as well as those of several other Media Blasters releases), and a slide show presentation of art and still shots from the film- set to Morricone's theme song.

Story:  4 1/2 Bitch Slaps
Extras:  4 Bitch Slaps
Picture/Audio 5 Bitch Slaps
Overall DVD:  4 1/2 Bitch Slaps