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Taking
a page from Sunset Boulevard, the
Italian thriller Short Night of
Glass Dolls has our tale related to us by a dead man.
Or a man that seems to be dead! Lying on a morgue gurney
unable to move so much as an eyelash, our hapless protagonist
struggles to piece together how he ended up paralyzed but conscious.
Our erstwhile corpse
is American journalist Gregory Moore (Jean Sorel), who was soon
to be transferred from his posting in Prague to London. He has
arranged to have his Czech girlfriend Mira (Barbara Bach) accompany
him; they look forward to living together outside of the oppressive
communist government of her homeland. Among Greg's fellow reporters,
Jack (Mario Adorf) is happy for him but Jessica (Ingrid Thulin)
is jealous and angry after having been jilted by Greg in the
past. The night, after showing Mira off at a society gathering,
Greg is called away by a false tip about a political suicide.
When he returns home Mira is missing... yet her clothes, passport
and jewelry have not been touched. The police are less than
accommodating and seem to have little inclination to conduct
a thorough investigation. With Jessica trying to convince him
that Mira has gone off with some other lover and several people
claiming she'd been talking of moving to Moscow, Greg begins
his own investigation. He and Jack start questioning the people
Mira spoke with at the party and looking into a series of unsolved
missing girl cases stretching back for years. Greg finds that
none of the missing girl's parents want to talk to him, with
one exception. When he attempts to meet this informant secretly
the man is murdered, but not before he points the reporter toward
a group known as "Club 99".
I
simply love mystery stories! I've read every kind of mystery
novel and watched every mystery movie I could since I was a
kid. I enjoy trying to figure out whodunit just as much as the
next guy, but after reading so much mystery fiction part of
the thrill of a new story is seeing how the standards of the
genre are handled. I may or may not be able to guess the identity
of the culprit but if the story is well told I won't complain.
Many years ago, when I first discovered the giallo sub-genre
I was amazed by the stylish ways in which a rather plain mystery
story could be re-energized and transformed. By simply applying
some of the same writing tricks employed by more inventive authors
and visualizing the murders as glossy set pieces, these films
made figuring out whodunit almost irrelevant. In a giallo, the
destination is never as important as the ride.
Happily this film is an exception to that rule. Along with style
to burn and one hell of a great mystery, Short
Night of Glass Dolls also has a fantastic and unexpected
ending. I won't give it away but the ending alone separates
this film from many in its sub-genre. Actually, this film separates
itself from the standard giallos in many ways. We are only once
shown a murder, there is no masked/gloved killer lurking in
the shadows with a knife nor is there a glorious set piece culminating
in a graphic death. But regardless of how it subverts the normal
giallo expectations (or maybe because of it), this is a good
little movie and worth revisiting more than once. Director/writer
Lado's odd editing techniques and the movie's flashback structure
keep the mystery from being obvious, ratcheting up the tension
very well. Often I find the kind of 'stutter step' editing used
for transitions in this movie to be off-putting, but here they
feel as though they fit the way the story is being related —
it's as if Greg is rushing ahead to the next bit of the story
before he's finished the part he's currently thinking about.
The pace of the movie is a little slower than it could be but
the editing keeps the momentum from fading. A small flaw for
me was that the dubbing is a little sloppier than it could have
been. There were several times that I had to back the movie
up to catch a line of dialog that was too soft; Jack's Scottish
accent tends to come and go at random. Still, Lado has a strong
story here and he uses it to make some sharp statements about
how the older generation uses the younger to hold onto power.
His use of butterflies as a metaphor for the younger generation
is an inspired choice and it's a pity that one of the original
ideas for the film title ("Short Night of the Buttlerflies")
had to be abandoned at the last minute. Ennio Morricone's score
is good but colorless and even after multiple viewings, it hasn't
stuck with me.
Short
Night of Glass Dolls
is a good giallo, but not a great one. It was a solid start
for Lado's career as a director and well worth a viewing for
the discriminating fan of thrillers.
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| Released
as part of Anchor Bay's Giallo Collection (but also sold
separately), the DVD is gorgeous. (In
addition to Short Night, the 4-disc
Giallo Collection also includes The
Case of the Bloody Iris, The
Bloodstained Shadow, and Lado's 1972 thriller Who
Saw Her Die?.)
The print is very sharp and
colorful, showing off the beautiful cinematography to great effect.
The movie is letterboxed at 2.35:1 and anamorphically enhanced.
Along with the trailer and a filmography of Lado is an 11-minute
interview with the director. Called Strange Days of the Short
Night, it is very informative and consists of Lado explaining
the origin of the film and some of the problems during production.
His bad working relationship with the cinematographer is very
interesting to learn about, as is his first choice for the lead.
1/18/03 |
