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Here at HORROR-WOOD, we like to occasionally dip into the giallo genre, since horror is often mixed with the messy murder mystery in that tasty Italian cinematic concoction. One of the essentials, we were given to understand, of the giallo film genre was a flick entitled (among other things), What Have They Done To Solange? Well, after finding so much of the film rather dull and unengaging, we find ourselves asking our own question...namely...
By HANK REARDON The 1972 giallo What Have They Done To Solange? is based on the novel The Clue Of The New Pin by Edgar Wallace, who died in 1932 while working on the screenplay for King Kong. One can only imagine the liberties that were taken with this story in its film treatment 40 years after Wallace’s death. (For the uninitiated, giallo is Italian for yellow, the color of crime novels sold in Italy during the postwar years.) What Have They Done To Solange? has plenty of female nudity and eye candy, surprisingly graphic murders and autopsies, decent acting, good location work in London, a compelling score by Ennio Morricone, and inspired cinematography by Aristide Massaccesi.
We have a killer dispatching nubile schoolgirls in a particularly horrifying way; a 31-year-old, married Italian phys ed teacher carrying on with an 18-year-old student; an embittered German wife whose love for her straying husband is rekindled as she helps solve the crimes; lesbian shower room scenes; bizarre secrets of the confessional; and the revelation that the killings are linked to the trauma endured by a girl named Solange. Yet What Have They Done To Solange? neither engages the emotions nor the intellect mainly due to a weak, meandering script and the blandness of its lead players. The first time I started watching this film, I fell asleep at the halfway mark. The next day, I viewed Solange again, but my mind wandered during some of the interminable talking heads scenes.
Technically, Solange is a well-made film with some gripping moments, but overall it's pretty slow-moving and, at 103 minutes, definitely overlong. So it’s not exactly the masterpiece it’s often claimed to be. My idea of a giallo classic is Sergio Martino’s The Strange Vice Of Mrs. Wardh (1971). What Have They Done To Solange? profoundly irritated me. I hated the dubbing. It wasn’t terrible, but the phony British accents annoyed me. Most of the actors are Germans pretending to be Brits, which is disorienting, as their facial features are distinctly un-British. (The producers could have avoided this cultural dislocation by setting the story in Berlin.) The actors’ accents are vaguely European, and not quite "English". The most annoying voice is that of Joachim Fuchsberger as Inspector Barth, who gobbles up an enormous amount of screen time in dull expository scenes. His pipe-smoking character is also insufferably smug and sure of himself.
Solange’s plot is overly complex and poorly structured, like one of Peter Straub’s elaborate murder mysteries. I’m thinking of the unwieldy plots Straub concocted for his novels Mystery, The Throat and The Hellfire Club. At a certain point, the reader gives up in frustration and throws the hefty book across the room. (However, I strongly recommend Straub’s extraordinary Vietnam War mystery Koko.) Solange’s story is a fairly complicated one, though the puzzle is an easy one to figure out, even though the filmmakers don’t play fair with the audience, introducing an important clue well into the third act. Despite a convoluted plot and a plethora of red herrings, the "surprise ending" is entirely predictable.
Enrico Rosseni (Fabio Testi), a gym teacher at a Catholic girls’ school in London, is having an affair with his student Elizabeth Seccles (Christina Galbó). One late summer afternoon, while Enrico is trying to seduce Elizabeth in a rowboat on the Thames, she witnesses a bare-breasted teenage girl fleeing a man dressed in priestly robes, and later catches a glimpse of the flash of a knife. It turns out that the topless girl is one of Elizabeth’s classmates, stabbed to death through the vagina (a murder technique also used in 1975’s Night Train Murders, previous reviewed in HORROR-WOOD. Other schoolgirls suffer the same ghastly fate after confessing their sins to a mysterious bearded priest whom no one is able to identify!
At first, Enrico is suspected of murder because he visited the scene of the first crime, but after endless deliberation, he is deemed innocent of any criminal wrongdoing. Enrico then takes it upon himself to investigate the murders, and his Teutonic wife and fellow schoolteacher Herta (Karin Baal) helps him track down the killer. It becomes clear that the victims were all somehow linked to a botched abortion procedure performed on their classmate Solange Beauregard (Camille Keaton), who regressed into a mute, childlike state after her ordeal. The killer is avenging Solange’s mutilation and madness, murdering the schoolgirls who convinced Solange to undergo the dangerous kitchen table operation. The middle-aged female abortionist is also killed.
Director Massimo Dallamano started out as a cinematographer on such Italian feature films as Herod The Great (1959), Pontius Pilate (1962), A Fistful Of Dollars (1964) and For A Few Dollars More (1965). In 1967, Dallamano began a decade-long career as a director, which ended when he died in a 1976 car accident at age 59. Dallamano also directed the horror thrillers Dorian Gray (1970), Coed Murders (1974) and The Cursed Medallion (1975). Using the pseudonym "Joe D’Amato," Massaccesi became a notorious director of exploitation films, including several horror movies – Death Smiled At Murder (1973), Beyond The Darkness (1979), Anthropophagous: The Beast (1980), Erotic Nights Of The Living Dead (1981) and Monster Hunter (1981). Massaccesi died of a heart attack in 1999 at age 62.
Leading man Fabio Testi is probably best known for his work in Vittorio De Sica’s The Garden Of The Finzi-Continis (1970), Sergio Sollima’s Revolver (1973), Alberto Negrin’s Red Rings Of Fear (1978) and Lucio Fulci’s Contraband (1980). Now 64, Testi still acts occasionally in European films, most recently in Santiago Segura’s crime comedy Torrente 3: El Protector (2005). After a brief international career, Karin Baal returned to Germany, where she has since worked steadily. Baal now plays grandmotherly types in German films and television. As for her horror claim to fame, she is best remembered for starring roles in two krimis directed by Alfred Vohrer: Dark Eyes Of London (1961) and The Horror Of Blackwood Castle (1968), both based on stories by the ubiquitous Edgar Wallace, the most often filmed novelist of the Twentieth Century.
Christina Galbó went on to star in one of the greatest zombie films ever made – Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974). The pretty but scrawny actress also appeared in Luigi Cozzi’s excellent 1975 giallo The Killer Must Strike Again and in the Spanish ghost story Supernatural (1981), before abandoning her film career in 1988. Galbó is now 55 and we’d like to see her in front of the cameras again. Joachim Fuchsberger is forever associated with Wallace, having starred in scores of krimis based on novels by the prolific English mystery writer, including Harald Reinl’s Face of the Frog (1959) and Hand Of The Gallows (1960), and Vohrer’s The Inn On The River (1962) and The Ringer (1964). Fuchsberger also starred in Don Sharp’s The Face Of Fu Manchu (1965) with Christopher Lee. Now 78, Fuchsberger retired from acting in 1998.
The beauty prize in Solange goes to the little-known blonde German actress Claudia Butenuth, who should have enjoyed a bigger career in movies. Twenty-six years old when she made Solange, Butenuth was perfectly convincing as a much younger schoolgirl. She also appeared in Castle Of The Creeping Flesh (1968), The Last Valley (1971) and The 500 Pound Jerk (1973). The divine Butenuth (now 59) hasn’t appeared in a film since 1988 and was last seen in a 1995 episode of the German crime drama Derrick. As is customary with most Eurohorror releases, Solange has different titles for different markets, among them: Terror In The Woods, The School That Couldn't Scream, The Secret Of The Green Pins, What Have You Done To Solange?, Who Killed Solange? and Who's Next. Next month, we’ll review Claudio Guerín Hill’s 1973 horror thriller La Campana del infierno/A Bell From Hell. This must be one scary flick, because its director jumped (or was pushed) from the bell tower before shooting wrapped. Stay ghoul as hell! Thanks, Hank. Although What Have They Done To Solange? is generally considered a seminal film in the Italian giallo genre, you're right about its weaknesses. The unraveling of the mystery seems to move at a snail's pace and no one seems to ask even obvious questions about the murdered girls' activities. But all of these plot misfires are sandwiched in excellent photography, a great music score, and some innovative set pieces...and thus this flick doesn't fall into the "bad film" category-- more like the "disappointing film" category. At least we've solved the mystery of "What have they done to this giallo?"--they gave it a threadbare script and likely shot it all, page by meandering, tedious page, that's what. Article copyright © Hank Reardon. |
