SHORT NIGHT OF GLASS DOLLS: Cold War Paranoia

Rating: 🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪

Every week, it seems like we’re getting some new scandal or development concerning our relationship with Russia. As a history nerd, it’s interesting to see just how much Russia is becoming a looming specter in American politics again. The Cold War seemed like such a distant memory, yet every day feels like it’s still going on. Oppression behind the Soviet curtain was often tackled in American cinema, be it Red Dawn or The Hunt for Red October, yet few looked at it from the perspective of those actually living there. Those films, above all else, were American patriotism fantasies, but as Americans, we never lived under Soviet rule and experienced the darker side of it.  Leave it to the Italians to pick up the slack in the form of an offbeat giallo: Aldo Lado’s Short Night of Glass Dolls.

The film is centered around journalist Gregory Moore (Jean Sorel) who is working in the post-Prauge Spring Czechkoslavkia. When his girlfriend Mira (Barbara Bach) goes missing, Moore is convinced that she has been kidnapped. However, his investigation into her death is hampered by authorities who believe he’s crazy and a town that doubts she ever existed in the first place. With the help of his former flame (Ingrid Thulin), Gregory finds himself pulled deeper into this darker mystery that reveals the more sinister forces pulling the strings in the city.

What I failed to mention in that brief synopsis is the inventive framing device that Lado uses for the narrative. The film opens with Gregory’s seemingly dead body being discovered. However, it’s revealed that he’s not dead, but completely paralyzed within his own body. From there, the entire film is mostly a flashback to Gregory’s investigation with occasional cutbacks to his body being examined in the morgue. It’s Sunset Boulevard-esque, but gives the story a sense of urgency rather than poignancy. The juxtaposition of the main flashback narrative and present framing device creates opposing intrigue and anxiety in the viewer. While we’re being roped further into the twists and turns in the mystery, we grow even more worried about Gregory’s fate with each new development at the morgue. It keeps us invested any time things begin to get slow.

It’s those frequent injections of intrigue that keep this film afloat, because it’s quite a slow burn at times. That’s not to say it’s boring, but fans of more conventional giallo films might be put off by it initially. There’s no black gloved killers running around and what little nudity there is in it is far from titillating. Short Night of Glass Dolls is more about the grotesque undergrowth of human nature rather than the contrasting allure of beauty and death of giallos from the likes of Argento or Martino. The film is more concerned with ideas of loss of control and class oppression taken to nightmarish extremes. Gregory’s loss of body control parallels the political allegory being made here as well, one of the inevitable recreation of power structures and the literal feasting on of the common people by the elite.

It’s these loftier ideas that are aided by Lado’s direction style. Lady isn’t often mentioned in the same breath as many other notable Italian exploitation directors, but he definitely had a style all his own. Rather than the emphasis on color that Argento and Bava brought to the table, Lado had a lot more in common with the likes of Lucio Fulci. His visual style embraces a sort of washed out color palette, populated heavily by whites and browns. It’s a very sterile looking world, reflecting the coldness of the world Gregory finds himself in. Dead bodies aren’t covered in garish blood, but rather pale and marble like, monuments to a life snuffed out too soon. The architecture of the city is foreboding and towers over the characters, representing the looming specter of the state over the proceedings.

All of this builds toward a climax and reveal that must be seen to be believed. If you’re thinking that the film is just spinning its wheels, you’re going to be floored. Many have compared it to Eyes Wide Shut, but Lado, like always, take it to another level. Here the orgiastic decadence represents the sacrifice of the youth at the altars of the establishment and the preservation of the state. Change and youthful optimism are simply things to be stamped out, or worse, co-opted by the powers that be to strengthen themselves. The film’s theme is ultimately one of hopelessness, that resistance against the establishment is inherently futile.

Short Night of the Glass Dolls may be just another entry in the giallo boom of the 1970s, but it truly stands out as one of the more high-minded examples of the genre. 88 Films recently put out a fantastic Blu-ray of the film, so it’s well worth picking up for your collection. It’s a film worth exploring if you get the chance, boasting an ending for the ages and one of the best examples of political commentary in Italian genre cinema.