“ I would rather not talk about the censorship of La ragazza in vetrina: I would’ve had to kill somebody over that story. They ruined me. I’d much rather talk about another suspicious aspect of the film that I haven’t ever explained to anyone: in the credits of the film there scores of people, Vinicio Marinucci, Luciano Martino, Pier Paolo Pasolini. Flaiano and Sonego would also have to be credited.

I wrote the screenplay on my own, creating the dialogue from conversations that I had with two prostitutes, two showcase girls with whom I would talk in English and Dutch’.

Emmer prefers to avoid the argument, the censorship of La ragazza in vetrina is a strange story that reveals more about the director than about the film itself.

Emmer clarified the nature of the censorship cuts when he described the scene that attracted their scrupulous attention: ‘The scene was very caste, only that it was entirely based on money: 25 florins for foreplay, getting up onto the bed and taking off his jacket and shirt costs him another 10 florins. Then he asks: ‘Aren’t you going to undress?’, 10 florins; in the end when she is in bed (if you think I’m going to allow a nude prostitute to be seen in one my films! we only see her shoulders) he, being a good Italian, moves closer to kiss her; she turns her face away and says: ‘No kiss!’. This was the most important scene of the film. They pass the weekend together and a simple friendship starts between them: but he decides to leave. She follows him to the station because he had left his suitcase behind: ‘You, dimenticato valigia!’. ‘Thanks blonde, if I make it back to these parts again I’ll come to find you”, knowing that it would never happen. With tears in her eyes the prostitute says to him, ‘No kiss?’. And then the film ends.

The prostitute in the store window had said professionally, ‘No kiss’, that is sex without kisses, here she asks instead: ‘You aren’t going to kiss me?’. The film was all there. And they cut the first scene, therefore the ending no longer had the same sense: it became pathetic and sentimental.

It was not censorship in the modern sense. It is said that censorship considers the pertinence of each scene. It doesn’t work that way. It was a moralistic censorship, and that’s what’s shocking about it’.

For Casiraghi (critic at the time for L’Unità) the film’s persecution was not based the incriminating scene as much as it hinged on the ‘first three hundred metres of film that created the tone of the rest of the story and its message. […] The first three hundred metres tells the story of the protagonist’s descent into the slums, the solidariety of the working class, and portray those human beings, young and old, black and white, […] who are constrained to jeopardize their lives every day in the infernal environment in which they live […]’. Another known fact: the film’s bright commercial future was destroyed because it was released three months late, prohibited to minors under the age of 16, and damaged by the censorship cuts. Luciano Emmer (‘I lost my contract, I lost my girls, and I lost the showcase’) after these ups and downs, pressed by economic difficulties, gave up on the cinema for over thirty and became one of the most esteemed directors of television spots”. (Giacomo Manzoli)