What Have You Done to Solange
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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What Have You Done to Solange? (Cosa avete fatto a Solange?) is a 1972 giallo film directed by Massimo Dallamano, and starring Fabio Testi, Karin Baal, Joachim Fuchsberger, Cristina Galbó, and Camille Keaton. The plot follows a series of violent murders occurring at a Catholic girls' school in England where a young student has gone missing.
What Have You Done to Solange? was an Italian and West German co-production, and credits itself as being based on The Clue of the New Pin by Edgar Wallace.
Plot
While in a boat making out with a college professor, a young woman sees a man with a knife stabbing another woman in the woods on the nearby shore. The professor convinces his mistress to keep silent about what she saw, especially after it turns out that the dead victim was one of her classmates.
Shortly afterwards, the professor's mistress is murdered in her bathroom. Police suspect the professor, who admits his affair to his sexually repressed wife in hopes of getting her assistance in order to clear his name. While this is going on, other women begin to go missing at the school; the professor is cleared when a common denominator is determined by the later killings. The victims all had seen a local priest and were friends with a young woman named Solange, who began attending the school the previous semester but had mysteriously vanished.
The professor's investigation ultimately leads to the existence of a hedonistic secret club of college girls that his mistress and the other murder victims had belonged to. The police further learn that the priest that several of the victims had spoken to was not a real priest. He was instead Solange's father, a wealthy businessman.
The last member of the sex club is kidnapped and killed, by being stabbed vaginally with a sharp butcher knife. The professor, his wife, and the police confront the father, who at first denies any wrongdoing until his daughter Solange appears. Mute and appearing emotionally disturbed, she leads the professor's wife to the place where the final sex club member was murdered. The father then confesses to why he murdered his victims. His daughter Solange had befriended the members of the sex club and was granted membership. However, after her first orgy, she became pregnant and refused to abort the child. The other girls in the sex club kidnapped Solange and held Solange down, against her will, as a back-alley abortionist that they had hired murdered her unborn child with a knitting needle. The betrayal at the hands of her friends, who murdered her unborn child against her will (and left her unable to ever have any children, due to the nature of the abortion), caused Solange to go irreversibly insane. After confessing, the father then takes his own life.
Cast
- Fabio Testi as Enrico "Henry" Rosseni
- Karin Baal as Herta Rosseni
- Joachim Fuchsberger as Inspektor Barth
- Günther Stoll as Professor Bascombe
- Claudia Butenuth as Brenda Pilchard
- Camille Keaton as Solange Beauregard
- Cristina Galbó as Elizabeth Seccles (as Christine Galbo)
- Maria Monti as Mrs. Erickson
- Giancarlo Badessi as Mr. Erickson
- Antonio Casale as Mr. Newton
