Country: ITALY/WEST GERMANY/YUGOSLAVIA
aka:
La corta notte delle bambole di vetro
Malastrana
Paralyzed
The Short Night of the Butterflies
Short Night of Glass Dolls is easily one of the most intelligent and stylish gialli to emerge out of Italy in the 1970’s. It marked the debut to feature filmmaking of Aldo Lado whose contributions to the giallo sub-genre are often overlooked. This is probably because he only directed two - but both this and Who Saw Her Die? (1972) have a thematic unity and a deftness of touch which separates them from those efforts which simply sought to regurgitate generic conventions. The subversion of the generic terrain is most prominent in Glass Dolls. This is one of the few gialli for example that has no major set piece murder scenes. It does away with the subjective point of view shots, it avoids slipping into the territory of camp, and has a general air of minimalism and subtlety that allows the unusual narrative to have space to breathe and develop. This is a fractured mystery which relies on the memory of the protagonist - and this immediately indicates the possibility of an unreliable narrator. Therein lies the inbuilt tension of the film, a tension that rarely lets up as the film twists and turns it way to an unforgettable and thoroughly disturbing climax.
