映画|ショート ナイト オブ グラス ドールズ|Short Night of Glass Dolls

"Strange Days Of The Short Night"
Aldo Lado
Writer/Director

Short Night of Glass Dolls was my first movie as a director. I became interested in writing this film because at that time, there were certain events happening that the public was not aware of. There was a political situation in Italy that was very strange. A judge spoke out against the system while trying to enforce the law and was transferred to some remote corner of Sicily or Sardinia. In other words, he was basically buried someplace far away. And this gave me the idea of someone who was 'buried alive' by the establishment when he got too close to the truth of their private business. I found a producer, who at the time was very young as I was also. His name was Enzo Doria, who in the '70s had given many directors, like Bellocchio with FIST IN POCKET, Samperi with GRAZIE ZIA, Agosti and me, the chance to make our first films. And that's the way the adventure of this movie began.

I chose Mario Adorf because I knew him from a movie we worked on together in which I was the Assistant Director. He was an actor of great substance, very interesting. I cast Barbara Bach for two reasons. One was technical-bureaucratic, because she was an Italian citizen, being married to an Italian at the time. Plus she looked very Middle-European, her face was very Slavic. Her beauty was stunning. As for Jean Sorel, this was a time in the '70s when Sorel was very popular in Italy. In reality, I had another actor in mind for the role. I had wanted Mario Girotti, who is also known as Terence Hill. He wanted to be in the movie, but his agent told me that I had to change the ending because it was impossible for this client to be in a movie where he had to die at the end. That's why I gave up on him, and gave the script to Jean Sorel, who agreed to do the movie. And I had to say that it was a good experience because I ran into him a few years ago at a party here in Rome and he told me, "You know, that movie is still my best performance as an actor."

When I wrote the screenplay, SHORT NIGHT OF GLASS DOLLS was not the title. I had called it MALASTRANA. Malastrana is a famous section of Prague where the goldsmiths work, very Kafkaesque in many ways. The film itself was inspired by the spirit of Kafka. Then later when the movie was done and about to be released, I had an argument with the distributors who said that nobody would understand the title MALASTRANA, that they would confuse it with Malatesta, with the Malavoglia, Malawhatever. Bottom line, we changed the title to THE SHORT NIGHT OF THE BUTTERFLIES, because there was the concept of butterfly, Barbara Bach's Character, butterflies in the movie and so on... The posters and ads had already been made, then another film came out called THE BLOODSTAINED BUTTERFLY. So at the last moment, we had to "slap a patch on it" as they say in Rome. That's how our title became SHORT NIGHT OF GLASS DOLLS.

My rapport with Ruzzolini was a little difficult, to be honest. He shot a number of films for Pasolini. He had just done TEOREMA, which I saw and liked. So as a cinematographer, he was a big shot. The problem was that we found ourselves shooting the movie with a crew that was almost completely foreign with only three or four Italians. He was also a cameraman and kept saying, "We are making a piece of shit. What the hell are we doing?" "What is this?" in his heavy Roman accent. After three or four days of that, we ended up throwing punches at each other. Afterwards, thanks to the intervention of the producer, we stayed and finished the movie. But instead of having someone's shoulder to cry on, I had a huge thorn in my side.

Ennio (Morricone) went on to compose the music for nine or ten of my films. My collaboration with Ennio has always been amazing. He comes up with ideas even before the film has been shot. He was already doing movies in America at this point and yet he always remained very easygoing with a humility ini his work that was extraordinary.

The most amusing thing I can remember about the movie was that I had chosen a location in a big rest home to shoot the famous scene. We were shooting the scene with the old people. I explained to them what I wanted and they came very discreet and shy. This was after I had shot the scene with the young people, who had been very clumsy, and the shoot was very tiring for me. I thought, "My God, now I have to go through this with the old ones." They were half undressed, kind of hiding themselves. But the moment the camera started rolling and they heard the music cue I had brought, these extremely elderly people, 70 years and older, they suddenly rediscovered the pleasure of the flesh and their own sexuality. They went wild! They kept licking and groping each other. I couldn't stop them!

This is when he discovers the truth, the moment when there is the dreamlike orgy where the old men, old in the sense that they represent the decay of society and its power, use the blood of young people in order to keep themselves alive. Even today, you can see that in order to maintain certain economic powers, men makes wars. And who is sent to war? Not old people like me. They send young men in their twenties to die and give their blood. Power, whether it is economic or political, maintains itself with the blood of the young. I believe that seeing a film is like reading a book, in that you assimilate certain images, words, emotions or sensations. But I have never chosen a model to follow. I always followed my own instincts. The last time I saw SHORT NIGHT... was something like thirty years ago when we screened the answer print at Technicolor. I never see my own movies, even in theater. Besides the fact that it makes me nervous, when a movie is finished and you've given your all, you feel exhausted. I never want to think back and agonize over if I could have done it better, changing this or that. No, the movie is finished. I did the best that I could.