Rating: ★★★

The Italian Giallo film emerged in the 1960s and quickly garnered a following. Mario Bava’s ground-breaking work Blood and Black Lace (1964), although not the first, laid the foundation for the genre, drawing inspiration from the psycho-thriller and in particular Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Bava’s extravagantly colourful lighting, bizarrely contrived plots, sado-sexual murders and elaborate directorial setups defined much of what would become synonymous with the giallo style. The term giallo – the Italian word for ‘yellow’ – originally denoted the yellow covers of a series of pulp mystery novels, yet came to signify a cinematic genre of film.

What Have You Done to Solange? is one the better among the giallo films not directed by Dario Argento or Mario Bava. Massimo Dallamano lacks the wild and baroque stylism of either director – although does retain the genre’s cliché of the killer who wears black leather gloves. The killing set-pieces here lack anything extravagant, except perhaps one nasty image of the killer ramming a knife between a woman’s legs. Nevertheless, Dallamano gives us evocative scenes such as the opening, a romantic scene between Fabio Testi and Cristina Galbo drifting in a boat on the river, all to the accompaniment of a lush Ennio Morricone score, as it is interrupted by flashes of the killer attacking.

One of the reasons What Have You Done to Solange? stands out is that it has a much better script than almost any other giallo you care to name – the works of Argento and Bava included. As a rule, giallo films tend to regard plots as a necessary evil and not place a great deal of effort into them but this is not the case here. The script does come with a number of sharply effective twists – one of these being [PLOT SPOILERS] the setting of Cristina Galbo up as the romantic lead and then her abrupt killing off about a third of the way in, followed by a tightly constructed series of twists where lead Fabio Testi becomes the principal suspect. The film also arrives at a much stronger motivating reason for the killer that any other giallo, one that also ties into Catholic themes.

The film is set in the UK and has been shot in London and surrounding areas. On the other hand, the principal location is a Catholic girls boarding school. While Catholic boarding schools do exist in the UK (and there are no less than three named St Mary’s), England is a predominantly Anglican country following Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy in 1534, which severed ties with Rome and confiscated church lands and properties. The differences between Anglicans and Catholics divided the country (and in particular Northern Ireland) for centuries. You suspect what the case here was that the Italians wrote what was familiar to them (Catholicism) without much of an awareness of the history of religious wars in the UK. The setting of the plot around a girls boarding school, Catholic mass, confession, priests in capello romanco hats and of the principal schoolgirl experiencing guilt about having sex, all makes a whole lot more sense when viewed in terms of an Italian story as opposed to one that would typically take place in England.

The plot does conduct some odd and unexpected doglegs. There is second-billed Karin Baal as Fabio Testis’s wife. When we meet her, Baal is shown as someone cold and deliberately mannish in looks with the intent to make her seem undesirable to us, presumably so as to justify Fabio Testi’s desire to leave her for younger student Cristina Galbo. Where in almost any modern thriller, Baal would be portrayed as the aggrieved wife, here after the removal of Cristina Galbo from the action, she suddenly becomes a far more sympathetic character, defending Fabio and standing by his side, while the film ends with them reconciled.

Fabio Testi doesn’t make for a very sympathetic lead. Testi has tall male model looks but is outfitted with what looks like a very fake beard. While his character is written as being sympathetic to the girls and their support against the establishment, Testi plays with an intense unsmiling seriousness that suggests troubled depths inside. The upshot of which is that he comes across more as the person that the police would probably automatically regard as a suspect when questioning the staff.

One of the surprise faces among the cast is a then 25-year-old Camille Keaton, looking thin, pale and all of about fourteen, who appears towards the end as the titular Solange. At the time, Keaton was working in Italy as a model, before making her acting debut here. A couple of years after What Have You Done to Solange?, Keaton appeared in I Spit on Your Grave (1978) and created a role that has made her a genre legend.

The film is supposedly based on the novel The Clue of the New Pin (1923) by Edgar Wallace, although this is only credited on some prints. The film bears almost nothing in common with the book. Part of the reason for this would seem to be the desire to tap into the popularity of the krimi films of the 1960s/70s, which were produced in West Germany, a substantial number of which were adapted from the works of Edgar Wallace. To this extent, the film is a German co-production, is set in England (as Wallace’s thrillers were) and winds in the krimi standard of an investigating Scotland Yard inspector. Furthermore, the film employs a number of German actors who had appeared in the krimi films, including Karin Baal, Gunther Stoll and in particular Joachim Fuschsberger, who played inspectors in a number of other Wallace adaptations.

Massimo Dallamano (1917-76) began working as a cinematographer, including shooting some of Sergio Leone’s key Westerns – A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). Dallamano directed his first fiction film in 1967 and made several other works in the field, including the giallo A Black Veil for Lisa (1968), an adaptation of Dorian Gray (1970) and The Night Child (1976). Dallamano also made a loose follow-up to What Have You Done to Solange? with What Have They Done to Your Daughters? (1974) about the investigation into a teenage sex ring.

Trailer here