Short Night of Glass Dolls

A body is found in a park in Prague. It is taken to the morgue. The man is not dead. He cannot move, speak or open his eyes, but he hears and thinks. Gregory Moore is an American journalist and he is listening to the preparations for his own autopsy. The narrative goes back: his girlfriend Mira disappeared one night. Gregory started looking. Nobody helped, no record was found and the witnesses did not speak. The closer he got the stranger the people around him became. Now he is lying on the table and his time is running out. Aldo Lado directs; it is his first feature. Jean Sorel plays Gregory; Ingrid Thulin, Mario Adorf and Barbara Bach are in the cast. It is an Italian production and the music is by Ennio Morricone. Its form is from inside a motionless body; the split between sound and image is the film's main instrument. It was shot in Prague and the city works inside the narrative as an enclosed place. The film is counted as giallo but uses few of the known giallo elements; the murder scene and the hunt for a killer are not at the centre. The matter it treats is power; the disappearances are not one person's work and there is an order behind them. The narrative is open to political reading and follows the same line as other Italian films of the period. Its ending does not give the genre's usual closure. Its limit is pace; the narrative is slow, the middle section sags, and the mystery opens late. Who it is for: viewers who like giallo, seventies Italian cinema and bleak suspense. Who it is not for: it is slow, cold, and the ending hopeless.