It's been a while since we've done a giallo on this blog, hasn't it? Yes, Dressed to Kill certainly had some giallo elements, between its black-gloved killer and its very stylish imagery, but I'm talking a proper Italian giallo. And I just so happen to have one by Lucio Fulci, of all people, from way back in the 70s when the giallo was king. So before I say "giallo" too many times so that the word starts to lose all meaning for me, let's take a look at Don't Torture a Duckling (also known as Non si sevizia un paperino and Don't Torture Donald Duck - that's the literal Italian translation, according to the IMDB).
In the small, isolated Italian village of Accendura, someone is murdering the young boys of the village. The suspects for these crimes include Giuseppe, the local peeping tom and village idiot; a Gypsy woman known as La Magiara (who the audience has already seen performing voodoo-esque rituals with wax dolls and pins); and Patrizia, the daughter of a wealthy man who has come to the town after being involved in a drugs scandal in Milan and is considered a "slut" by most of the village because of her provocative dress and flirtatious behaviour. As young boys continue to die, Patrizia and a journalist arrived in the village to cover the story, Andrea Martelli, team up to investigate the murders in a parallel investigation to the village police chief. But will they be able to discover the murderer's identity before anyone else is killed in the village?
If you come to Don't Torture a Duckling expecting levels of gore on par with Lucio Fulci's other works, you might come away being disappointed as the film is actually quite restrained. The murders of the young boys, for example, are for the most part quite restrained, with them mostly being strangled to death. There's certainly no eye-gouging or enucleation. that's not to say that there's no gore whatsoever in the film, as there are two scenes that are very Fulci - one involving someone being whipped to death with chains and the other involving a character falling from a cliff and getting their face torn off on every jagged rock they hit on the way down. But for the most part, Don't Torture a Duckling focuses more on the whodunit, police procedural and suspense aspects of the giallo - as well as the problems of religion and superstition in small communities.
It's the latter topics that actually got the film in some controversy when it was first released in 1972. Because of its criticism of the Catholic Church, Don't Torture a Duckling was actually blacklisted and was not even released in the US until 2000 when Anchor Bay got hold of the rights and finally gave it a full release. As well as the religious aspect, the film also treads some... interesting ground with its depiction of young boys attempting to spy on couples having sex. In a couple of other scenes, Patrizia teasingly flirts with two of the future victims, once while completely naked (and gosh, Barbara Bouchet is an attractive woman in this film).
Don't Torture a Duckling is beautifully shot, and Fulci himself considered it to be his personal favourite of all the films he made in his career. There are lots of long, distant shots of people walking alone in the Italian countryside, emphasising the isolation of the village and the people despite it being close to an apparently busy highway. The highlight of the film, I think, is the aforementioned scene where a character is beaten with chains though. The characters involved all move so slowly, as though it's all happening in a dream, and it's set to two radically different pieces of music - a rock and roll tune and a slower, more haunting melody that both play on a car radio as the events of the scene take place.
As I mentioned above, Don't Torture a Duckling is perhaps slower-paced than some of Fulci's other, better-known works, and that might put some viewers off. The film is much more about atmosphere than action and gory effects (although, as I said, there are some in the film if you need that itch scratched. It looks at some controversial topics that are still relevant today, and it does so in a thoughtful, not cheap, way. And by the end of the film, even the literal Italian translation of the title makes sense.
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