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The
beach side revelry of several Australian
citizens is crudely interrupted when a
dead body is discovered amongst several
wrecked and abandoned cars near the
water's edge. With the corpse's face
gruesomely beaten and burned well past any
point of recognition, when the
fingerprints don't turn up anything, the
police are left with two monumental tasks:
one, finding out who their female victim
was, and two, track down whoever did this
terrible thing to her and arrest their
sorry ass.
During
the initial autopsy, it's revealed that
she was shot in the throat, but the real
cause of death was a severe blow to the
head and the resulting skull fracture.
Also of note, there is trace evidence that
the girl recently had sex with at least
two different men. With the media smelling
blood, and a ton of pressure coming from
the top brass, the Chief of Detectives
assigns the case to Inspector Ramsey (Ramiro
Oliveros) who is explicitly charged
to wrap things up as quickly as possible
-- and by any means necessary. And while
he focuses on "extracting" a
confession from a degenerate beach bum,
the case also attracts the attention of a
retired Inspector Thompson (Ray
Milland), a cranky and acerbic old
coot who really doesn't have much faith in
this younger generation of detectives; as
proof of his doubts, one of Ramsey's better
ideas to I.D. the victim is to put the
preserved corpse on public display like a
macabre museum piece to see if anyone
recognizes her. (And with her face
completely gone, I'm assuming he hopes
someone will remember some dimples on her
rear-end?)
As
the irascible Thompson ingratiates himself
into the investigation, he takes up a few
discarded clues, including a few grains of
rice found in the singed yellow silk
pajamas the victim was wearing, and
follows his instinctive nose until it
leads him to a possible I.D. and three
suspects; a college professor, a factory
worker, and a waiter, all embroiled in a
love quadrangle with the same woman,
Glenda, who seems to move with the breeze
from man to man, searching for something
she cannot define, let alone find it. And
as her desperate search for some kind of
fulfillment spirals quickly down the drain
with one bad decision after another, she
puts herself in harms way when that
quadrangle starts to implode around her.
Meanwhile, Thompson narrows done his
suspect list to the probable killer, and
then puts himself in mortal danger to lure
the killer out of hiding...
...On
a crisp September morning back in 1934,
while walking his new prized bull toward
his home in rural Albury, Australia, Tom
Griffith spotted -- or smelled? --
something strange protruding from a
culvert that ran underneath Howlong Road.
Closer examination proved it to be a
severely mangled and burned corpse, and
after the authorities were called in, they
determined it to be a petite female,
probably in her twenties, who had been
shot in the throat, and whose bludgeoned
skull was fractured so badly that part of
the brain was exposed. Due to the charring
and the severity of the injuries, with the
only real clue to her identity being the
partial, oriental-style silk pajamas that
survived the flames, identification of the
victim proved difficult -- if not
impossible, making apprehending whoever
had done this even harder to catch. When a
couple of missing persons leads didn’t
pan out, the local authorities, spurred on
by a voracious media blitz and a lurid
lured public, allowed the body of the now
dubbed “Pyjama Girl” to be moved to
Sydney, where it was embalmed, preserved,
and in a bizarre, morbid twist, put on
public display to see if anyone recognized
her.
Hundreds
turned out, but no one knew her, and for
ten years, not unlike the notoriously
gruesome Black Dahlia murder in America
several years later, the media-fed public
refused to let the Pyjama Girl case go
away. Constantly reminded of the failure
to bring any kind of justice in the case,
New South Wales
police commissioner William “Big Bill”
MacKay reopened the investigation, and
according to some sources, already had it
solved; and whether his “pre-selected”
prime suspect was guilty or not was
irrelevant. The suspect in question, an
Italian immigrant by the name of Antonio
Agostini, had just spent the last four
years in an alien internment camp during
the war. His wife, Linda, also an
immigrant, had disappeared about a week
before the Pyjama Girl showed up, was of
similar build, but was ruled out
forensically at the time. However, ten
years later, suddenly, the dental records
magically matched up, and after an intense
interrogation, and a viewing of the
pickled body made up to look like his
wife(!), Agostini confessed that he
accidentally killed her during a drunken
domestic dispute and burned the body to
destroy the evidence in the ensuing panic.
Convicted of manslaughter, Agostini served
six years and was deported back to Italy
when his sentence was up.
Declaring
the case solved, the body was finally
buried and MacKay moved on. But others,
suspicious of his dubious and sometimes
brutal tactics, weren’t as easily
convinced, felt the fix was in, and still
believe in Agostini’s innocence and the
true identity of the Pyjama Girl to still
be a mystery. Recently, historian Richard
Evans makes a strong case in his book The
Pyjama Girl Mystery by
pointing out a ton of discrepancies in
Agostini’s confession, and the fact that
the Pyjama Girl had blue eyes while his
wife’s were brown. Oops. So if it
wasn’t her, then who really was the
Pyjama Girl? There’s been talk of trying
to link the body through DNA to relatives
of several other missing persons, but
sadly, we may never know.
A
true-life mystery from Australia seems an
odd inspiration for a Spanish/Italian
co-produced giallo, but one has to wonder
if it wasn't a smokescreen to cover the
fact that even though scriptwriters Rafael
Campoy and Flavio Mogherini, who also
directed, used the Pyjama Girl as the
appetizer to get you to the table, the
main course owes more to another true-crime
case sensationalized by a recent
best-selling novel and a big-screen
Hollywood adaptation that was due to be
released the very same year as their film.
While watching The
Pyjama Girl Case unfold, it
doesn’t take long to see a strong
correlation to Judith Rossner’s novel Looking
for Mr. Goodbar. Itself
inspired by the murder of Roseanne Quinn,
Rossner lets us know on page one that her
protagonist, Theresa Dunn, is dead,
murdered by some creep she picked up in a
bar when a one-night stand goes bad. The
rest of the novel is then spent showing us
the tragic circumstances that led Theresa
to this predicament: a sad tale of a
double-life -- school teacher by day
Theresa, and trolling the bars at night
for rough-sex Terry, crippled by an
extreme case of self-loathing, embroiled
in a self-destructive, futile search for
love, acceptance, or fulfillment on any
level that will, or from what we’ve
read, could, never be satisfied.
Here,
Glenda Blythe (Dalila di Lazzaro)
appears to be trapped in the same
psychological quagmire, and her trio of
lovers mirror Theresa’s almost
identically; first off is her college professor (Mel
Ferrer), who shines her along and
then brushes her off; second is Roy, an aggressive
and possessive macho prick whose only
interested in his end of the screwing (Howard
Ross a/k/a Renato Rosini -- who made a
career out of playing macho-pricks);
and lastly, Antonio, a simple but earnest beau who
truly worships and loves her, and begs her
to marry him (Michele Placido).
In the novel, Theresa, feeling she
doesn’t deserve it, refuses the
proposal, but in the film we take a
divergent course when Glenda takes the
plunge after finding out she’s pregnant.
Even though he isn’t sure if the baby is
his -- he's not that naive, a slightly
bitter Antonio doesn’t welch and still
agrees to the wedding. And for a brief
moment, Glenda appears to be happy, or at
least content -- but this is short-lived
when the baby died not long after it was
born. Depressed and disillusioned, saddled
to a low-wage husband with no real
prospects, her marriage barreling toward a
dead end before it even began, Glenda
starts sleeping around again.
But
when this proves to be another futile
gesture to fill an empty hole, the girl
realizes that the only person who treated
her right and that she truly, maybe, cared
for, was an old friend who lent her a pair
of yellow silk pajamas at a sleep-over to
wait out a violent thunderstorm. And since
this is a giallo, you’d be right in
thinking that friend was female; and
though they shared the same bed, Glenda
wasn’t prepared for her lesbian advances
at the time and shied away. Now, rejected
and dejected, fraying around the edges of
sanity, with nothing left to lose, Glenda
burns all her bridges, steals Roy’s RV,
and sets out to track down this old
friend. (And is this friend our
Pyjama Girl?) But things continue
to take a downward spiral when Glenda
prostitutes herself, needing money for
gas, and agrees to a roadside motel
quickie with two slovenly travelers while
one of their idiot offspring watches. To
complicate matters further, Roy, thinking
she’s dumped him and run off to
permanently shack up with the professor,
rounds up his friend Antonio and goads him
on to bring his wife back -- whether she
wants to or not. Together, they track her
down to a secluded spot where she pulled
over to sleep for the night. At Roy’s
insistence, Antonio goes to retrieve her.
When she refuses, clad in those very same
silk pyjamas, things go quickly from ugly
to homicidal…
The
first time I watched The
Pyjama Girl Case it took me until
about halfway through the movie before I
realized what Mogherini was up to. And
what he was up to was pretty darned
ingenious, and he executed it – well,
almost brilliantly with only a few minor
hiccups as things barrel toward the
climax. Basically, he breaks the story
down into two progressive threads; the
first deals with Thompson and Ramsey as they
try to identify the corpse and catch the
killer, while the other deals with forlorn
Glenda and all her lovers. And nope, I
didn’t realize until the scene at the
seedy hotel when Glenda makes her break
that half the plot so far had been nothing
but one long flashback. E'yup, as Thompson
doggedly digs up clues in the other plot
thread, that leads him closer and closer
to the killer, crossing paths with surly
Roy and flaky Antonio -- but never Glenda--
do we realize, as our heart sinks, that Glenda
is the Pyjama Girl, she’s
already dead, and not the killer’s next
intended victim. And it would have been a
kick-ass final shock/reveal, too, but
Mogherini shows his hand, in this case,
pyjamas, a little too early, and to
complicate matters further, the movie then
drags on for about another half-hour to
wrap-up all the other loose ends to one of
the bleakest and most depressing films
I’ve seen in a good long while as once
again, everyone we've met so far either
winds up dead or incarcerated.
 Still,
Mogherini wound these two separate plot
threads together rather beautifully into
that final knot, leaving all kinds of
clues for us to figure it out (and
upon a second viewing it all seems embarrassingly
obvious), and though he kinda got
his finger stuck in the tangle at the end,
he should be commended for the effort.
Known mostly for his lavish production and
set designs for films like Diabolik
and the early Hercules movies,
Mogherini does the exact opposite here,
using the monolithic and sterile concrete,
steel and glass structures of Sydney to
help emphasize the isolation and
desperation of the characters -- outcasts
all. And as his actors move around these
sparsely populated streets, and Riz
Ortolani's pulsating, John Carpenter-esque
score hammers at you, you'd swear you were
watching some kind of sci-fi Dystopian
thriller along the lines of Logan's
Run,
not an
Italian whodunit. And then there's
that totally obnoxious theme/ballad
crooned by Amanda Lear, sounding like a
morphine addicted and nicotine scarred
lounge lizard. Laughable at first, but
dang it, if that doesn't bore into your
head like a Ceti-eel and gets comfortable
after awhile -- and you'll wind up humming
it to yourself, over and over again, for
at least the next three weeks; trust me.
The
film is not without it's flaws, especially
in the investigation thread, but most of
them can be glossed over thanks in most
part to the efforts of Milland. It does
the heart good to see the aging actor
having a total blast with his character
after so many years of angrily
cashing-in-a-check in a string of
low-budget, exploitative dreck. Mogherini
does better with Glenda, in
fact, I think he does a better job of
capturing the true nature of Rossner's
character in the novel better than Richard
Brook's adaptation of Looking
for Mr. Goodbar. While Brooks does
everything he can to eliminate Theresa's
culpability in her own murder, to garner
her more sympathy, Mogherini leaves it all
in, making it hard to sympathize or even
like Glenda, (likewise Theresa in
the novel.) One minute you want to
give her a consoling hug, the next you
want to gently bop her in the head to
knock some sense into it. Known mostly for
her role as the rejected monster's mate in
Andy Warhol's
Frankenstein, the drop-dead gorgeous
di Lazzaro seems about as wrong a choice
for the character as Diane Keaton was in
Brooks' adaptation, but she anchors the
film with a rock-solid performance as the
doomed Glenda, bringing Rossner's novel
back to it's true self-destructive and
tragic roots, and not, as Joe Bob Briggs
put it in his book Profoundly
Erotic, a defensive-driving
course for women looking for sex -- a
morality play, and if you don't pay
attention and obey the rules, you could
die at any moment.
 In
the end, it
may seem that who really killed Glenda
doesn't matter. She knew what she was
doing, knew it was wrong, and still made a
lot of bad choices, usually making things
worse. And that is one of the biggest
problems most people have with this film.
Yes, she dug her own grave, but did she
really deserve to die because of these
mistakes? I mean, Are we still blaming the
victim, here?
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