Today I offer you two movies, separated by nearly fifty years, with two very different approaches to paralysis. One is a suspenseful Giallo about being mistaken for a cadaver. The other is an action movie that would love to forget disability even exists.
Short Night of Glass
Dolls (1971)
Gregory Moore isn’t dead, but the morticians don’t know
that. His body is discovered in a garden one morning in Prague by a gardener
who only cares about not getting blamed for a homicide. Moore is actually
totally paralyzed, unable to speak or so much as blink or move an eye. He’s
mistaken for an unusually warm dead body, and morticians study him trying to
figure out what’s wrong with the cadaver. If they don’t figure it out, he could
be buried alive, or accidentally killed on an autopsy table.
He struggles to think of how to alert someone for help, and
tries to comb his memories for what caused all of this. Because of his
condition, he can’t act on the immediate conflict. The movie punts, using his
memories to flashback and tell the story of what happened before this morning.
Moore had a girlfriend who abruptly disappeared, and with police refusing to
help, he infiltrated the seedier parts of Prague’s society for answers. It
brought him into the proximity of some grim murders, although he didn’t notice
them at first and didn’t realize what peril he was in.
