Short Night of Glass Dolls 4K UHD Review

Celluloid Dreams

Blu-ray Release: April 29, 2025

Video: 2.35:1/2160p (HDR10/Dolby Vision)/Color

Audio: Italian and English DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 Mono; isolated score DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 Mono

Subtitles: English, English SDH

Run Time: 96:53

Director: Aldo Lado

American foreign correspondent Gregory Moore (Jean Sorel) is on his final assignment in Prague before transitioning to London. He plans to bring his beautiful Czech girlfriend Myra (Barbara Bach) with him, freeing her from the shackles of oppressive Iron Curtain politics. But their plans are suddenly derailed when Myra vanishes without a trace. His investigation into her disappearance makes him realize that decadence, superstition, and hunger for power run deep in the City of a Hundred Spires. And then his own body turns up in a park… (From Celluloid Dreams’ official synopsis)

About two years ago, perennial podcast co-host Patrick Ripoll and I recorded a two-part piece on the giallo movies of 1971 (listen to it here and here). Of the 40-plus gialli and giallo-adjacent films released during this peak year, we covered 12, which I picked based on their accessibility, the familiarity of the filmmakers, and particular thematic qualities that I hoped would paint the most complete picture of the genre at the time. We ended the series on Aldo Lado’s Short Night of Glass Dolls (Italian: La corta notte delle bambole di vetro; aka: Paralyzed, 1971) – a unique combination of gialli, doomed romance, political thriller, and cult horror that remains an enduring favorite of genre enthusiasts.

Within Italy, Lado is recognized for his work writing and directing comedies, melodramas, romances, and even a Star Wars spoof/knock-off (The Humanoid [Italian: L'umanoide, 1979]), but, outside of the country, he is remembered almost exclusively for the three thrillers he released at the height of giallo’s market saturation*. Short Night of Glass Dolls was the first and his first film as lead director, following the loss of original director, Maurizio Lucidi, and secondary producer, Antonio Margheriti (who may or may not have intended to direct at some point).

The screenplay was initially a mob drama and went through significant changes as it was passed around. At some point, a draft ended up with Giallo Godfather Ernesto Gastaldi, though Lado claims that A…For Assassin co-writer Sergio Bazzini (Italian: A... come assassino, 1966; directed by Angelo Dorigo, also co-written by Gastaldi) – who was known for his left-leaning texts – deserved credit over Gastaldi. The key to the film’s political component, however, came from Lado himself, who, while working on the script, was sent on a location scout in Prague for an unnamed/unfilmed movie one year after the Prague Spring. The pervasive sense of social anxiety in the city led him to completely reevaluate the film.

The Prague Spring was a series of events that shifted the Czechoslovakian Socialist Republic’s politics, split parties, led to invasion by the USSR, and a period of media censorship known as Normalization. This deepened western left wing disillusionment with the Soviets and inspired various media, including Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (pub.1984) and Otakar Vávra’s Witchhammer (1970), which alludes to Normalization in the context of the Moravia witch hunts of 1670s. Lado doesn’t literally translate the events of Prague Spring, but weaves its influence into a wider and increasingly wild fictional conspiracy propagated by the societal elite**.

In the grand giallo tradition, Short Night of Glass Dolls deals in a few misogynistic stereotypes, but Lado is also critical of feminine objectification and violence against women. In the Argento tradition, the male lead’s neglect leaves his female partner in danger and, in the Sergio Martino tradition, every man in frame has the potential to be a sadist sex-killer. This is taken to a ridiculous extreme when the wider conspiracy is finally revealed, but Lado also makes room for a more nuanced and grounded look at gendered violence.

It is implied that so many women go missing that an investigation is almost impossible (especially given the political gridlock) and the only reason this particular missing person is gaining attention and resources is that a foreign journalist with media clout is invested in finding her. In one scene, the authorities bring Gregory to a crime scene to identify a body that turns out not to be Maya. The unnamed victim is then swiftly bagged up and taken away, never to be acknowledged again. This might just have been an excuse to build some suspense or drop a casual red herring, but it’s presented in a way that implies meaning***.

Outside of giallo fandom, Short Night of Glass Dolls isn’t usually remembered for its troubled pre-production or political underpinnings, but for a unique framing device that gives it an haunting horror edge and the excuse to break into surrealism as the mystery comes together. You see, the entire story is narrated in flashback by Gregory himself, who is lying on a table in the morgue, locked in his own body, and presumed ‘dead.’ Lado implies that Gregory’s broken mind may be misremembering events, but avoids confirming if his catalepsy is real, imagined, or a supernatural event.

I’m curious as to what inspired this framing gimmick. Lado might be referencing Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun (J.B. Lippincott, 1939), about a WWI soldier who loses his limbs, sight, hearing, and voice and, unable to communicate with doctors, escapes into flashbacks and fantasy. Or maybe Edgar Allan Poe’s The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (pub. 1845) about a man who dies while hypnotized and is unable to escape his body. There’s also a tradition of noir tales, like Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), in which victims narrate their stories from beyond the grave, but I’ve always been reminded of the cruel, pulpy ironies of EC comic anthologies, which often exploited the fear of being buried alive.

Lado’s next film as writer/director, Who Saw Her Die? (Italian: Chi l'ha vista morire?, 1972), reuses Short Night of Glass Dolls’ basic story structure of a man looking for a missing loved one (a daughter, instead of girlfriend) in a foreign country (Venice, instead of Prague). It streamlines the ideas and amplifies the melancholia by removing the horror twist, dialing back the surrealism, and pushing the political angle further into the subtext. His next thriller, Late Night Trains (Italian: L’Ultimo Treno della Notte; aka: Night Train Murders, 1975), wasn’t, strictly speaking, a giallo, but a slick and furiously political riff on Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (1972). It was banned as part of the Video Nasties craze in the UK, making it Lado’s most well-known film outside of Italy.

Jean Sorel appeared in seven definitive gialli, beginning with The Sweet Body of Deborah and including Lucio Fulci’s Perversion Story (Italian: Una Sull'altra; aka: One on Top of the Other, 1969) and Lenzi’s A Quiet Place to Kill (Italian: Paranoia, 1970). He is joined here by former Bond Girl Barbara Bach, who worked with Lado again on The Humanoid, Bergman collaborator Ingrid Thulin – who didn’t do any more gialli, but was in two influential proto-Nazisploitation films, Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969) and Tinto Brass’ Salon Kitty (1976) – and spaghetti western favorite Mario Adorf – who had important roles in Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Italian: L'Uccello dalle piume di cristallo, 1970) and Michael Schaack’s gory talking cat cartoon, Felidae (1994).

* Lado was involved with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, though his exact role is contested. The most likely scenario seems to be that he brainstormed an adaptation of Fredric Brown’s novel The Screaming Mimi (E.P. Dutton, 1949) with Argento, only to be completely shut out of the process when Argento decided to take sole credit.

** The film was initially set to take place in Mala Strana (the German title still reflects this), the Prague district where Franz Kafka lived, and makes allusions to the author’s work, though I’m not well-versed enough in literature to speculate on this (or the supposed connections to numerology).

*** It might be worth noting that (spoiler) Myra is eventually discovered dead in a refrigerator, predating the infamous issue of Green Lantern (vol. 3, #54, 1993), in which the titular hero discovers the body of his girlfriend in a refrigerator. Based on this event, writer Gail Simone coined the phrase “Women in Refrigerators” (or “fridging”) as a catchall term for literary practice of assaulting and/or killing female characters in order to motivate male protagonists.

Bibliography:

Italian Giallo in Film and Television: A Critical History by Roberto Curti (McFarland, 2022)
La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film by Mikel J. Koven (Scarecrow Press, 2006)

Video

Short Night of Glass Dolls has had a healthy life on digital media, including matching 2002 and 2016 DVDs from Anchor Bay and Blue Underground, and a Blu-ray from Twilight Time in 2018. I had a copy of the German Camera Obscura BD and can verify that it more or less matches the video quality of the TT disc. This is Celluloid Dreams’ second major 4K giallo, following their fantastic UHD/BD release of Giuliano Carnimeo’s The Case of the Bloody Iris (Italian: Perché quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer?, 1972), and the included booklet describes the restoration thusly: the 2-perf 35mm negative was scanned in 4K by Agustus Color in Rome. Dirt/scratches/debris were digitally removed in-house and the HDR color timing took various original production aspects into account, including lab specifications and a ‘low-fade’ archival positive print.

I have included comparison sliders with screencaps from Celluloid Dreams’ Blu-ray copy (left) and the Twilight Time disc (right). The Blu-ray caps aren’t showing the full 4K resolution or the HDR upgrades, but it is a good illustration of the differences in color timing and grading between them. Before I dig into those aspects of the restoration, I’ll start by verifying that the detail, texture, and cleanliness of the 2.40:1, 2160p transfer is outstanding. Grain appears accurate, edges are tight without haloing, and any remaining artifacts seem film-based, not the result of compression or damaged negatives.

With that out of the way, as you can see, the grading is really different and, while I think it’s an across-the-board improvement (especially with the HDR10 boost in effect), it is the kind of change that will inevitably lead to debate among fans. The restoration appears at times much darker than the old HD transfer. Probably anticipating controversy, Celluloid Dreams refers to the Kodak laboratory aim density (LAD) specifications in the booklet and suggests viewers watch the film in a dark room. Neither Lado nor cinematographer Giuseppe Ruzzolini were around to verify CD’s work, so it’s up to us to decide.

My point-of-view is that the old transfer is clearly too bright, blowing out the depth and fine details of lighter shots, and revealing too much information in several dimly-lit shots. This is actually a problem I have with several DVD era remasters of Italian and Spanish genre titles, and something that has (in spite of new problems) been largely corrected over the years. Arguably, CD’s restoration pushes things too far in dim interiors and overcast exteriors, but the tradeoff is worth it, given the more eclectic & vivid palette and general moodiness. I could be swayed with more evidence, but currently accept that this restoration is more in line with what the film was designed to look like.

Edit: After finishing the sliders, I realized that the CD transfer is shifted slightly right and the TT transfer is shifted slightly left.

Audio

Short Night of Glass Dolls is presented with Italian and English dub options, both in uncompressed DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0. As per usual, Italian films of this era were shot without synced sound, so every language track has been dubbed in post. It appears that the lead cast was often speaking English on set, which makes sense, given their mixed nationality, but no one is dubbing their own performance on the English track. The mixes are similar, so this comes down to taste. Lip sync is a bit tighter in English, but some of the voices are weirdly miscast. On the other hand, I kind of respect the film for casting against the actor’s given accent. For example, American Bach and German Adorf both (usually) have an Eastern European lilt, while Frenchman Sorel and Swede Thulin (usually) speak with American English drawls.

The music was composed by Ennio Morricone, who was just as important to the giallo fad as the spaghetti westerns. This is one of his better thriller scores, because he isn’t simply grafting a new melody onto the Bird with the Crystal Plumage mold. He’s still paying homage to himself – utilizing vocalist Edda Dell'Orso and experimenting with dissonance, for example – but he’s also following the film’s lead in terms of genre and tonal switching. It’s a nice companion piece to his Who Saw Her Die score.

Those that enjoy the music are in luck, because this collection comes with an isolated score track, also presented in uncompressed DTS-HD Master Audio mono.

Extras

Disc 1 (4K UHD)

Commentary with writer/director Aldo Lado – This track, in French with English subtitles, was initially recorded for Neo Publishing’s 2007 DVD and is moderated by All the Colors of Giallo (2019) director Federico Caddeo. Lado comes ready with loads of anecdotes about the making of the film and Caddeo keeps things moving with occasional, generally screen-specific, questions about the production and plot. Caddeo brings up Stephen King’s 1997 short story Autopsy Room Four and Lado tells a true story about an unnamed screenwriter who suffered from locked-in syndrome, but, unless I missed it (and I might have – there were a lot of extras to cull), he didn’t mention any other inspiration for the wraparound plot.
Commentary with Guido Henkel – Author and film historian Henkel’s second commentary for Celluloid Dreams explores the careers of the cast & crew, the production history, locations, the political/social themes, Lado’s style, differences between the German, Italian, and English versions of the film, and the many things that separate Short Night of Glass Dolls from other gialli of its era.
Isolated score
English international, Italian, ‘grindhouse,’ and unreleased Catalepsis trailers

Disc 2 (Blu-ray)

Commentary with writer/director Aldo Lado
Commentary with Guido Henkel
Isolated score
English international, Italian, ‘grindhouse,’ and unreleased Catalepsis trailers

Disc 3 (Blu-ray Extras)

The Nights of Malastrana (101:08, HD) – I’m not sure where this pair of retrospective interviews with Lado and Jean Sorel originated, but Celluloid Dreams lists the production date as 2015, so maybe it’s derived from the shorter Czech Mate doc that was made for Camera Obscura’s DVD? The discussion is certainly extensive, running longer than the film itself and covering Lado’s career as writer and director, the long production phases of Short Night of Glass Dolls (his story remains pretty consistent with the interview quotes in Curti’s book and the old commentary), and the challenges of shooting behind the Iron Curtain. Lado is full of behind-the-scenes stories and Sorel’s sections, though shorter, add an important actor’s perspective.
All About Lado (32:32, HD) – This 2018 interview doesn’t appear on any previous DVD or Blu-ray as far as I can tell. Naturally, there is some overlap with the other interviews and commentary, but also a handful of exclusive anecdotes about Lado’s early life and wider career.
The Quest for Money (20:10, HD) – This 2020 interview with producer Enzo Doria is on loan from the French Le Chat Qui Fume Blu-ray. In it, Doria looks back on his adventures as actor and producer, and the making of Short Night of Glass Dolls. Interviews with Lado and Sorel are edited into the featurette for further context.
To Italy and Back (30:17, HD) – Another interview from the Camera Obscura discs, this time with German co-producer Dieter Geissler, who reminisces about breaking into the movie business as an actor, assistant director, and, eventually, producer, before describing the international production processes of the era and making of Short Night of Glass Dolls.
The Most Beautiful Voice in the World (21:44, HD) – A 2015 interview with Edda dell'Orso, taken from the Camera Obscura DVD/BD. Morricone’s favorite soprano discusses her love of music, her training, various movie jobs as a soloist and as part of a choir, working with Morricone, and the evolution of her career.
Cuts Like a Knife (23:48, HD) – In the final Camera Obscura interview, editor Mario Morra breaks down high points in his career, movie by movie, emphasising Short Night of Glass Dolls.
The Man on the Bridge: Philosophy, Perception, and Imprisonment in Aldo Lado’s Short Night of Glass Dolls (23:08, HD) – A new video essay from critic/filmmaker Howard Berger that explores the Prague Spring, Lado’s socio-political interests, the film’s plot and its cosmic implications, connections to Kafka and French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writings, and allusions to other films, including both the 1956 and ‘78 versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. His most astute observations are the similarities between Lado’s film and René Laloux’s animated classic Fantastic Planet (French: La Planète sauvage, 1973) and the fact that an abstract painting seen in the background of one scene actually depicts the climax (I can’t believe I never noticed it!).
Image gallery
German Malastrana opening credits and end card (4:19, HD)

Disc 4 (Blu-ray)

‘Grindhouse’ version of Short Night of Glass Dolls (97:08) – A good ‘n dirty 35mm archival lab print with Italian and English mono audio options, both in compressed Dolby Digital.
US Paralyzed version (96:35) – A pan & scan VHS source with English Dolby Digital audio.

The images on this page are taken from Celluloid Dreams’ 4K restoration Blu-ray and Twilight Time’s Blu-ray – NOT the 4K UHD – and sized for the page. Larger versions can be viewed by right/cmd-clicking each side of the sliders. Note that there will be some JPG compression.