Few giallo movies move past the typical Edgar Wallace murder mysteries with some gore and erotica thrown in. I love those movies, but Lucio Fulci's Don't Torture a Duckling is a different beast. This is a story about a backwards society where superstitious and religious people treat any outsiders with scorn and suspicion. Children are killed, showing no one is safe. Made by a person so many people call misogynist, this movie actually highlights the gender differences in such a backwards society. Women in this movie are either blamed or suspected for the murders, yet no one looks around the one obvious person because they are part of a respected institution. I think people should start thinking about Fulci in a different way, instead of saying he's misogynist, I think he shows just how cruel and self-serving men can be at times and the recipient of that is usually underprivileged and less able women. Apart from all the thematic elements this is one of the most beautifully photographed Italian movies and Riz Ortolani's score is one of the best.
Synopsis: A reporter and a young woman investigate a series of child murders in a remote town.
The movie starts with three youths, Bruno, Michele, and Tonino going to spy on men getting it on with prostitutes. Some of the dialogue, while dubbed seems like typical things young men would say. "They've got tits like watermelons, with huge rears." At the same time the village idiot, Giuseppe goes to peep on the prostitutes as well and the boys arrive to taunt him and he threatens to kill them. This sequence has other notable things as well. It starts some of the great hillside cinematography that just looks incredible. Sergio D'Offizi also did the cinematography for House on the Edge of the Park and Cannibal Holocaust and it shows. At the same time these prostitutes aren't exactly tens and it shows that women who do that sorta thing in a small village are probably not going to look like supermodels. Somewhere on the hillside a woman named Maciara is shown to be putting pins in three dolls in a sort of black magic ceremony. This is intercut with stills of the three boys showing they are represented by the dolls. This is supplemented by some great cues by Riz Ortolani that repeat during climactic moments throughout the film.
Michele goes back to the home where his mother, a maid works. He goes upstairs to give orange juice to the rich socialite woman living there, Patrizia (Barbara Bouchet). What follows is a weird scene where she appears to try to seduce Michele flaunting her naked body in front of him. I also enjoy one shot of him looking through a fish bowl to see her. Patrizia seems to get joy out of her control on the young boys in town as we find out she is treated like an outsider by others.
Barbara Bouchet is strikingly beautiful as Patrizia
Spoiler Section
Eventually all three boys are killed by strangulation. The first and third you actually see and the scenes are shot at night in the rain with some great atmosphere. The second is a disturbing, but at the same time silly dummy shot of Tonino in a bathtub. When Bruno, the first boy goes missing a media circus follows. Andrea Martelli (Tomas Milian) becomes the main character of the story. A regional police commissioner (Virginio Gazzolo) also goes to the town to investigate. Giuseppe starts sending ransom blackmail to Bruno's parents. In a sting he is arrested shows them the dead body, naturally they think he is the killer. He is let go when Tonino is killed. Giuseppe is one of the only male outsiders in this movie and you can see early on how the town treats people perceived as different by the way they spit and shout out him when he is escorted out of the police station. When Bruno's body is found, Don Alberto (Marc Porel) the local priest is introduced followed by the many children he plays soccer with.
The film seems to be doing everything they can to set up Patrizia as a murder suspect. She is shown to be on the phone when Michele is right before he goes out and gets killed. Later when another boy going to peep on the prostitutes she has him change her flat tire. As she says I'll give you money but then offers a kiss instead of money. Mario then turns up dead not long after. Another boy who was with Mario goes back to Don Alberto and the boys and tells them about it and Don Alberto runs off. Upon rewatch this is the obvious reveal for him as the killer. Andrea is the only one who seems to give Patrizia the time of day. Eventually she is interrogated by the cops and reveals she goes to see Francesco (Georges Wilson) the local dabbler in black magic.
What is interesting about this is Francesco is revealed to have taken in Maciara when she was young and got her pregnant "to get the devil out of her." The baby was born disfigured and died. Yet Francesco is considered a celebrity and man of stature whom many people in town go to see. Maciara the victim of his pedophilia is viewed as a witch. When cops go to interrogate Michele's mother and father they only seem to focus on how late she was out working. This only intcreases the discrepancies between how men and women are treated, not only the townspeople, but by the authority figures. Don Alberto's mother is seem as the person who drove her husband to suicide and the townspeople only seem to tolerate her because her son is the priest. They treat her daughter, and Don Alberto's sister like dirt because she is slow and is called retarded several times.
Just past the middle of the movie is my favorite sequence and one of the best 20 minute sequences in any movie I've ever seen. Maciara is captured by the police and she admits to "killing" the boys with her black magic. The police hold her but eventually let her go. Florinda Bolkan's acting in this sequence is great and quite energetic. Once she is let go people are all closing their doors to her. She is cornered by the three boys father's in the cemetery and beaten to death by them, dying as she gets to the side of the road by the highway. The use of music in this sequence is memorable. Ornella Vanoni's song is haunting. This was one of the first times Fulci experimented with gory special FX as the wounds the chains make on Maciara's skin are previews for things he would do in later movies. The tourists passing by her as she dies near the highway adds an extra layer of sadness and despair. So these men committed private justice on the woman who couldn't have possibly killed the boys, yet they don't look at all to the priest who is always around them.
Florinda Bolkan gives a terrific performance as Maciara
Eventually Patrizia and Andrea find one of Malvina's, severed doll heads near a crime scene. Malvina is the daughter of Aurella (Irene Papas) Don Alberto's mother. Martelli deduces that Malvina has seen the murderer and is imitating his strangulation techniques by beheading her dolls. They track Malvian and Aurella down in the mountains but Don Alberto shows up to Malvina, finally revealing his guilt. Him, Martelli and Patrizia have brutal fight on the cliffside ending with Martelli kicking him off the cliff. A voiceover by Don Alberto explains that he killed the boys to preserve their innocence before they fell into the age of carnal temptations. Again, it should be noted it takes a journalist and another outsider to figure this out because the civilians respect Don Alberto too much to ever even think he could be the killer. A lot of people make fun of the silly looking dummy at the end scraping along the rocks but its still gory so I like it.
I haven't even talked much about how like the other camera angles in this. There are some great split diopter shots during the interrogation scenes and some great shaky cam closeups. I love the story and I love how it shows quite realistically across all of time how people in respected institutions can avoid blame and suspicion even though it's so obvious. It should be noted that the priest is never shown to be pedophilic toward the boys. However, pedophilia is still shown to be condoned in the name of religion in the case of Francesco and Maciara. This movie really shows how in a backwards town women and outsiders are still treated with suspicion and scorn.
English dubbing Cast
- Michael Forest dubs Tomas Milian as Andrea Martelli
- Frank Von Kuegelen dubs Mark Porel as Don Alberto
- Susan Spafford dubs Barbara Bouchet as Patrizia
- Carolyn De Fonseca dubs Florinda Bolkan as Maciara
Rating: 10/10
Trivia: None of the main principal cast were Italian. That includes Tomas Milian, Georges Wilson, Barbara Bouchet, Florinda Bolkan, and Marc Porel.
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