A working-class woman is gang raped in the back room of a bar, then battles the legal system twice, going after both her attackers and the onlookers whose cheering fueled and encouraged the assualt.

A lurid tale of sex and psychosis is among the wildest of the Gainsborough melodramas. Set in Italy, it begins as a comparatively sedate tale about a respectable, convent-raised woman who is haunted by the memory of being raped as a teenager. But when her grown daughter returns from school, her life begins to unravel in monumentally surprising ways.