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Synopsis: The lifeless body of American journalist Gregory Moore is found in Prague. He is taken to the morgue for autopsy, but Moore himself is still conscious, even though his body shows no signs of life to the medical examiners. He tries to reconstruct how he came to this pass in his mind, all the while hoping against hope that he can show some signs of life before his autopsy commences. Moore was finishing up his tour of duty in the city prior to his predicament. He had been planning to head back to the West with his girlfriend, Mira, in tow. Moore remembers his last couple of days with Mira. It was Mira's disappearance that sent him into danger. The list of suspects is long. On the one hand, there is the mysterious person who has been abducting women in the city for months. On the other are those in the circle of his job: his immediate supervisor and the powers of Prague society who may view Moore as a thorn to be removed. There is also the alarming possiblity that the mysterious kidnapper and the Prague elite are one and the same person...

Allegories: Director Aldo Lado made his first film, Short Night of Glass Dolls, on location in Prague a few short years after the crackdown during the Prague Spring. One wonders, given that this film is a thinly disguised allegory to that event, how Lado was able to get this past his Czech overseers. One suspects that this is a case of a disreputable genre masking a serious intent. And if the story arc didn't make Lado's meaning clear enough, he names Barbara Bach's character "Mira Svoboda," which translates roughly to "peaceful freedom." The tenor of the political content of the film is interesting given that the Italian filmmakers of the period tended towards a Marxist viewpoint when their films were overtly political. Lado doesn't take that rout, which is hardly surprising given the nature of his material. While there are certainly other ways to interpret the film, it seems plain to me that the intended interpretation is this one: "A totalitarian cabal of the old and corrupt suppresses and exploits the young as a means of extending their rule. The free world--here incarnated as an American journalist--is paralyzed in the face of the politics in the Eastern Bloc." Lado would expand his critique of power to encompass forces in the West in his later movies, but here, the result is strikingly anti-communist, and surprisingly pro-American. Lest an American audience embrace this, though, I would note that the film's ending is particularly misanthropic.

Influences: As a formal construct, Short Night of Glass Dolls shows its director to be a student of Hitchcock. The framing device, featuring a paralyzed man on the verge of being autopsied will be familiar to anyone who ever saw the episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents in which Joseph Cotten found himself in the same predicament (one of the episodes directed by Hitchcock himself, as it so happens). Lado changes the ending of that story, though. Also recalling a Joseph Cotten role, this film echoes Carol Reed's The Third Man by building the film around an American journalist abroad in a menacing old European city. Finally, one can recognize a hint of Rosemary's Baby in its cabal of decrepit villains. What this film doesn't resemble is the classical giallo mystery: absent are the masked, black-gloved killers, the deranged psychological backstory, and the elaborate murder sequences. Hell, in spite of the flashback structure of the film, the narrative is remarkably linear, an area that has never been the giallo's strongest point. It's almost as if Lado is experimenting to see how many of the elements of the giallo he can omit before the film becomes something else entirely. He doesn't quite push it out of the genre, though he comes close.

Performances: I have to admit, I'm never quite sure of how to judge the performances in Italian genre films. How much of the performance is lost through dubbing? My experience with Mad Max suggests that dubbing by its ownself can completely sabotage a movie. To my untrained eye, the performances in this film are no worse than they are in any other Italian movie of similar vintage. Having seen Ingrid Thulin give superb performances for Bergman, this has to be some kind of disappointment, but even if she were speaking with her own voice, I suspect that she wouldn't be able to overcome the hideous scarves provided her by the costume department. Ugh. Call it a wash. As is the case with most gialli, this is the director's film. On this count, it is a superior example of the form. Aldo Lado manages to construct his film without cribbing from Bava or Argento and stakes out his own themes. He is using the genre rather than capitulating to it. He is abbetted in this by the city of Prague itself. The architecture of the city gives the film a texture all its own. This has been ably captured by cinematographer Giuseppe Ruzzolini. The ubiquitous Ennio Morricone provides the score; as is the case with most of the Morricone scores for the genre films of the time, this one adds a further texture of menace.

This film can be found in Anchor Bay's "Giallo Collection," which also features Lado's follow-up, Who Saw Her Die? If you've exhausted the films of Mario Bava and Dario Argento, this is a good place to begin exploring the rest of the genre.

1/30/2005