If you search for information about the 1976 Annie Belle star vehicle La fine dell’innocenza you’re more than likely to run into the IMDB page, which lists the film under the title Teenage Emanuelle. It’s a bold, eye-catching title, for sure, slotting the film into the wider “Emmanuelle” series, but was it ever actually used? For IMDB to list the film under that title, you’d think there would be ample evidence of the film being screened or even released on home video as Teenage Emanuelle. Well, you’d be mistaken. 

I’ve actually found surprisingly little evidence the film was ever released anywhere under the title Teenage Emanuelle. Below you’ll find a couple ad mats from Jacksonville, Florida and Bristol, Tennessee. Both from 1985. That’s pretty late to be re-releasing this 1976 softcore film, making me wonder if it’s even the same Annie Belle film we’re talking about. Distributors at the time were not above slapping provacative titles on some spare prints they had lying around, fooling drive-in moviegoers into thinking they were going to see a new film. This could be one of those cases. The fact of the matter is that there are no one-sheets, posters or press-books featuring the title Teenage Emanuelle.

When working on my Annie Project, the question of how I would refer to this movie in my manuscript was one I spent a lot of time thinking about. Like many other Harry Alan Towers productions, the film was a “Euro pudding” co-production with Italy, England and France all with fingers in the jar. My standard rule is to refer to films by their most common English language title when available (usually the best known home video release), but in the absence of that, to use a translation of the original title in the country of origin. The rub with La fine dell’innocenza is: what’s the country of origin? Towers was a British ex-pat, but the director, Massimo Dallamano, along with the majority of the crew, were Italian. And the star was French. Do we defer to the Brit, and in that case, call the film Blue Belle, as it was commonly known in Greater England? Or do we refer to it as The End of Innocence, the English translation of its Italian title? I never even considered the French title, Annie ou la fin de l’innocence, because it’s an unoriginal mash-up of several others.

There is another option. In the United States, the film got heavy play on the drive-in circuit under the title Annie: The True Story of Annie Belle. But the film was never released to home video with that title. The only home video releases, of dubious legality, use the title La fine dell’innocenza, Blue Belle or the West German title, Annie Belle – Zur Liebe geboren (Annie Belle – Born for Love).

In any other situation, I would refer to the film as Annie (that’s currently what Letterboxd does), a shortened version of its English language theatrical release. But the problem is, referring to a film called Annie in a book about Annie asks the reader to make a distinction between character in the film, the name of the actor in the film, and the film itself. It’s a lot to ask.

So, what did I do? I looked to Harry Alan Towers. In his biography, Mr. Towers of London: A Life in Show Business (BearManor Media, 2013) Harry writes about working on the project that became La fine dell’innocenza. He explicitly mentions that his original screenplay was titled, The End of Innocence. Well, that’s enough for me. Not to mention, I think The End of Innocence is an appropriate title for the film, more properly reflecting the themes and the generally light, but dramatically erotic, mood. And, you know, a character does lose her innocence. That’s more “true” than the claim that the film was based on Annie Belle’s (the actress) real life experiences.

To add a further wrinkle to this already long-winded story of personal, editorial pedantics, if this film ever was to get a proper, North American home video release (preferably on UHD, it deserves it), I would argue with the distributor to use the title Annie: The True Story of Annie Belle, instead of the title I use in my mansucript. Annie is the title most people will most remember it by, if anyone alive still remembers it. This was not an obscure film at the time of release in the United States, getting steady play from sea to shining sea in the lower 48. It’s also an important film in Annie’s filmography, the first in which she would adopt the “Belle” moniker, which she would use for the remainder of her career. It’s also the film that “launched” her internationally, with jet-set Harry sending his young starlet on a whirlwind press tour in 76-77, where the Parisian “street urchin” (his words) charmed the masses with her distinctly un-star-like personality, combined with her effortless, French sexuality. It might not be a True Story, but Annie is one that benefits from being as closely associated with the name “Annie Belle” as possible. I just won’t be using that title in my book.