Short Night of Glass Dolls 4K 1971

There are often two opinions about Short Night of Glass Dolls: that it's a very bad jallo, and a very good movie. In my opinion, both are wrong. First of all, this tape has nothing to do with giallo at all, except for the characteristic title. As for the criteria of “good/bad” assessment, it would be appropriate to remember the political situation at the turn of the 60s-70s: the confrontation between left and right forces in Europe at that time, the rather significant influence of the Soviet Union and the entire socialist camp on the formation of European politics, on the ferment of minds among the creative intelligentsia, etc. So, if we consider Aldo Lado's debut work as a mixture of conspiracy detective and political pamphlet, it may have been quite good. After all, it allowed him to take a place, though not on the Olympus of Italian cinema, but somewhere nearby. But having lost its political acuity and relevance over time, the movie turned into a boring, drawn-out, uninteresting action, the lack of dynamics in which is not compensated neither by reliable psychology, nor by the actors' work, nor even by interesting mise-en-scene. The episode with the orgy of old men in the finale, which has become a proverbial parable, looks like a pimple on a gray, unmemorable face against the background of all the previous action. Of course, it attracts the eye, but you don't need such happiness for nothing.

Interesting and bright actors: Jean Sorel, Barbara Bach, Ingrid Tulin - of course, pull “Short Night of Glass Dolls” to the general average level, but only just. But if Mr. Lado had not been carried away by political allusions, the story of an American journalist's search for his missing girlfriend in ancient and mysterious Prague could have remained interesting forty years after it was first told. But most of the protagonist's antagonists were too caricatured, the director demonstrated his political views too clearly, and he put too much satire into the supposedly mystical-dramatic plot for the movie to remain interesting for decades. One Black Mass, even with an orgy in the spirit of the films of the studio “OMA” here was clearly not to do ...

On the other hand, Aldo Lado's contemporaries seem to have ignored the director's political escapades, and paid tribute to the rather exotic locations in which the action takes place, to the unusual plot, when the narrator is a body in the morgue, still alive, but mistaken by everyone for a dead man, and, finally, to the very devil-worshippers, whom the common man was already ready to see in every Communist leader, not to mention KGB agents. And the common man did not care that Prague was filmed in Yugoslavia, that Lado ridiculed not only and not so much the gerontocracy of the socialist camp (not so “gerontocracy” in those years, by the way), but also his own politicians... And in general, that he ridiculed anyone. But there was a lot of seductive Barbara Bach (not Ringo Starr's wife at that time), but there were sinister KJBs (never mind that they were called differently in the Czech Republic) and there was Black Magic with its subsequent exposure. That was what was needed to lure the respectable public to the cinemas. Voilà!