One of the best things about gialli in general are the wonderfully meaningless but poetic titles: Blue eyes of the broken doll! The case of the bloody iris!1 Your vice is a locked room and only I have the key! If it weren’t for the capital in Five dolls for an August moon, I wouldn’t even know whether it was supposed to be a moon in summer or a moon that’s particularly majestic and dignified. There are no dolls, the moon doesn’t play any role, and I have no idea where they got the ‘five’ from either.
But there are thirty-two dolls for this extremely august lunatic: there’ a chess scene. At this point, about half of the characters have been murdered and stored in the freezer. Consequently, the probability of any single survivor being the murderer has become alarmingly high. Could it be our chess player?
As you can see in the picture above, he’s facing off against half a glass of cranberry juice and he seems to be having a hard time of it. With the exception of black’s king’s side, we get a very clear shot of the board.2
Okay, this seems to be a relatively normal position. White has well-developed pieces. The bishop on a6 is decidedly annoying, but it doesn’t need to be fatal. However, for some undisclosed reason, white decides to take on c6, offering an exchange in order to prevent himself from castling.
Whether he is the killer or not, this move is as strong an indictment as one could need. He is duly killed for his misdeeds and gets all eternity in hell to ponder the possible meaning of this movie’s title.
Realism: 3/5 White’s position seem fairly plausible, although the queen on g4 is a tad puzzling. The disappearance of black’s b-pawn is also somewhat worrying.
Probable winner: I think the cranberry juice has much the better chances here,3 seeing as it just got an exchange for free.
1. [Not to speak of the sodding retina!] ↩
2. [One diagram editor for an august reader.] ↩
3. [It’ll win with its tanks and its bombs and its bombs and its guns.] ↩