Our
film begins as the beach side revelry of
several Australian citizens is crudely
interrupted by the discovery of a dead
body 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
the victim 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 sleuths; 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
morbid 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 silk remnants of the
yellow pajamas the victim was
wearing, and follows his instinctive nose
until it leads him to a possible I.D. and
three probable 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 down
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 Glenda 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
slightly 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 their baby dies 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 gialli, you’d be right
in thinking that friend was female; and
though they shared the same bed, Glenda
wasn’t prepared for the 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 good friend Antonio and goads him
into bringing 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. And at Roy’s
insistence, Antonio goes to retrieve her.
When she refuses, clad in those very same
silk pyjamas, things go quickly from tense
to ugly
to homicidal…
Okay,
then.
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 after the
initial infection; trust me.
The
Pyjama Girl Case 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. For 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 Glenda really deserve to die because of
these mistakes? I mean, Are we still
blaming the victim, here?
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