short night of glass dolls

If Zombie represents the pinnacle of Italian excess, director Aldo Lado's Short Night of Glass Dolls is its cerebral opposite. Just a year after Argento’s groundbreaking giallo The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Lado tried to up the ante with his politically minded thriller, Short Night of Glass Dolls (1971). Featuring a fair share of recognizable stars (Jean Sorel, Ingrid Thulin and Barbara Bach), stunning cinematography and an unsettling Ennio Morricone score, the film is a direct reflection of Lado’s enthusiasm as a first-time filmmaker. The raw ingredients are nothing special within the genre – Bach disappears without a trace, Sorel tracks her down amidst a crowd of likely suspects – but the director uses a clever flashback technique to tell the story.

Trapped in a cataleptic state, journalist Gregory Moore (Sorel) is wheeled into the city morgue, desperately trying to communicate with the technicians who've already declared him dead. As Moore struggles to recall exactly how he wound up on a slab in the first place, he narrates the mystery from a cold slab, starting with the unexplained abduction of his lover, Mira Svoboda (Bach). Using his journalistic instincts, Moore determines ground zero is an exclusive club whose members make up the communist elite of Prague. But their intentions are far more sinister - and far-reaching - than a simple kidnapping.

Most gialli leave you with nothing more a confusing pile of mixed motivations and red herrings interrupted by flashy moments of sex and violence (not that there's anything wrong with that!). But Lado's script plays fair from the get-go, drawing the viewer in with its premature burial story structure then sneaking in some political commentary unique to the genre. That the film saves its most startling revelations for last is to be expected...but the ingenious work that comes before it most certainly is not. Short Night of Glass Dolls is one heck of a debut for Lado and set the stage for follow-ups like Who Saw Her Die? and Night Train Murders that are equally worthy of praise and attention.

Twilight Time's 3000-copy limited edition features a top-notch HD transfer, well worth the upgrade from the old DVD, along with an isolated music track, trailers, Italian and English-dubbed audio tracks, liner notes and audio commentary with film historians David Del Valle and Matteo Molinari.