The Suspicious Death of a Minor

A teenage girl asks a police officer for help and is killed the next day. The officer goes after it without using official channels. The trail leads to a prostitution ring using underage girls and from there into the wealthy circles of the city. The killers are not the only group that wants the file closed. The subject is not the murder but who holds the protection. The ring survives not through police incompetence but through indifference higher up, and the film says so directly. The form uses two genres at once, and that oddity is its most striking feature. On one side the classical thriller convention of the gloved killer operates; on the other the chases and police scenes are taken from the Italian crime films of the period. Comedy sections are inserted openly and the tones never blend. The production belongs to the period after Sergio Martino's thrillers; he was working across several genres in those years and this film is read as an experiment in fusing two of them. The chase through the fairground is its most cited sequence. Claudio Cassinelli plays the policeman, with Mel Ferrer in the cast. Who it is for: viewers who like seventies Italian genre cinema. Who it is not for: anyone who wants a consistent tone; the film cuts from a murder to a joke.