Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade (Italian: La via della prostituzione, lit. 'The path of prostitution') is an Italian sexploitation film from 1978 directed by Joe D'Amato as his last Black Emanuelle film.[2] It was also known as Emanuelle and the Girls of Madame Claude.[3]
Plot
Emanuelle is in Kenya to arrange an interview with the Italian American gangster George Lagnetti ("Giorgio Rivetti" in the English dub). She succeeds in meeting him with help from her friend Susan Towers and Prince Aurozanni but is intrigued by other events, leading her to meet the white slave trader Francis Harley, and setting her up for a dangerous undercover operation at the San Diego mansion of Madame Claude, which functions as a brothel for top-level dignitaries and civil servants.
Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade features the investigative journalist character known to her readers as 'Emanuelle' (Laura Gemser). Like most films directed or produced by Joe D'Amato, it is an attempt to capitalise on the commercial success of another film - in this case the 1977 film The French Woman (French: Madame Claude). The film is one of the Black Emanuelle films with the heaviest censorship, eight minutes cut in a theatrical release.[4]
Release
Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade was released in Italy on April 20, 1978.[5]
Reception
In a contemporary review, John Pym (Monthly Film Bulletin) "a flimsy, though surprisingly unsensational, yarn supposedly concerned with the horrors of 'white slavery'. The dismal artifice of the whole severely tests the viewer's patience."[1]
