What Have They Done to Your Daughters? (1974)
Shameless DVD (region 2)
d. Massimo Dallamano; scr. Ettore Sanzo, Massimo Dallamano; ph. Franco Delli Colli; m. Stelvio Cipriani; ed. Antonio Siciliani; cast. Giovanna Ralli, Claudio Cassinelli, Mario Adorf, Farley Granger, Franco Fabrizi (87 mins)
Director Massimo Dallamano made a name for himself in popular Italian cinema with the erotic drama Venus in Furs before making what many consider one of the finest “giallo” thrillers, What Have You Done to Solange? A journeyman director on a tour through Italian mainstream cinema, Dallamano next turned his attention to another genre popular in 1970s Italy, the “polizia”: lurid crime melodramas and police procedural detective stories involving the seediest, immoral aspects of the Italian underworld, often with hints of broad political corruption. It is in this genre that Dallamano made What Have They Done to Your Daughters? so titled as to suggest a follow-up to his previous film hit although it is a fully self-contained movie. Shameless DVD – as part of their rewarding re-issue of a number of prominent Italian horror, sex and genre exploitation movies from the 1970s – have here released the longest-ever version of What Have They Done to Your Daughters?
A steadily-paced meditation on human sexual vice, WHTDTYD? is a gripping police procedural thriller with a gritty social conscience founded on an Italian fondness for examining the repercussions of the age of permissiveness. Hence, themes of societal sexualization and the commoditization of young women are evident here and the film slowly reveals a world of teenage prostitution and political degeneracy with the observation of a contemplative morality play within the guise of its detective story. As a look at vice, WHTDTYD? is an engaging entertainment, bringing to the polizia some of the dangerous titillation found in the giallo, but with far more concern for the moral repercussions of vice than for their illicit sensationalist indulgence. This emotional distance and perspective is the strength of the polizia.
“Every day we read or hear about brutal things that happen which appear to have no logical explanation. Only a faithful reconstruction of such incidents can bring to light the dramatic and disturbing truth behind them.” Such is the title card that begins WHTDTYD? and the depths of the truth behind what ordinary people only know from surface events is what interests Dallamano: as it would interest David Lynch a decade later when he turned his camera to the immorality beneath the veneer of middle-America in Blue Velvet. But it is not only the immoral truth of the hidden, terrible logic revealed in this film but it’s manipulation in the world of politics that makes WHTDTYD? a critical and even condemning perspective on modern morality, sympathetic to its exploited victims.
A naked fifteen year old girl is found hanging from a ceiling rafter after an anonymous phone tip-off to the police. An autopsy reveals semen traces in her vagina and anus. The police treat the matter as a suicide until they trace down the anonymous caller, a peeping tom who has been taking pictures of the girl having sex with her boyfriend in the days before her apparent suicide. An assistant District Attorney soon suspects the involvement of former student radicals turned political activists and believes the girl did not commit suicide but was murdered. With a homicide detective now on the case, they look closer and find that the suicide was indeed a staged event. Questions of who killed her and why then trigger an investigation that leads to an underground network of teenage prostitutes with connections to political corruption at the highest levels.
Director Dallamano uses the police procedural to examine sexual politics. The more the detectives uncover about the life of the dead girl (revealed in flashbacks), the more the generation gap between Italian youth and their parents is revealed. Youth here approach sex with an anarchic freedom – the film has young Italian girls topless, in school uniforms, etc – that attracts exploitation by predatory Patriarchs. But the focus here is Patriarchy’s need to police itself. WHTDTYD? hence contrasts the responsibility of the female District Attorney in charge of the case with the sexual exploitation that the same Patriarchy the District Attorney must serve are capable of enforcing on disposable young women. Moral, political expediency are director Dallamano’s subtexts and they emerge playfully alongside increasingly distorted point of view work recalling the women in peril thrills of the giallo though always stepping back for a moral perspective on trashy material.
There’s an off-screen, implied sordidness to male morality as cumulatively revealed in WHTDTYD? that is harrowing in its implications: a scene in which the district attorney and the police detective listen to the audio recording of the rape of a teenage girl sold into sexual union is confronting. The ideological tension within the exploration of sexuality and gender-based sociological power is brought out with a similar fascination for the inter-relationship between sexuality and personal power director Dallamano brought to his study of masochistic sexual role-play in Venus in Furs (also released on DVD by Shameless). Indeed in both films, women in positions of power and control interest the filmmaker: in Venus in Furs it was at the level of sexual politics in WHTDTYD? it is in terms of social politics and he devotes time to the feelings of the teenage girls whose lives are exploited by barely-glimpsed predatory men, bringing a humanist perspective to the film. Such moral perspective and visual restraint ensure this is a thriller of ideas much more so than exploitation.
Pretty Italian girls and a few glimpses of teen titty! Mature women with tremendous responsibility in a man’s world! Sexual indulgence at its most taboo, tape-recorded and played back as chilling glimpses into predatory male sexual pathology! A black leather clad motorcycle driving assassin! These and much more combine to make WHTDTYD? a winner of a police procedural thriller. With appreciated dedication, Shameless DVD have presented the film in the longest version yet released. Titles and some scenes are thus in Italian with embedded subtitles, but the film retains its more shocking moments of gore and sexual titillation, although Dallamano’s morality prevents this from ever being indulgent: indeed, you may appreciate WHTDTYD? for it’s restraint; or perhaps consider that its shortcoming – this is “respectable” Italian filmmaking, far from the excesses of exploitation that comprised the “spaghetti nightmare” exploitation emerging alongside it, examples of which comprise the Shameless DVD catalogue at time of this release.
A dependable, polished widescreen transfer, trailers and a nice reversible cover offering alternative poster art make this Shameless DVD of What Have They Done to Your Daughters? a welcome collectible.
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