The Pyjama Girl Case (1978) The Giallo that was changed by the sands of time (Review)

In 1934, the body of a young woman was found on a beach in Albury, Australia. She had been shot, and the body had been set on fire to destroy the evidence. Police eventually identified her as Florence Agostini, an English-Australian who had taken her Italian husband’s surname. It took a decade for the identification to be made, during which time she had entered true-crime fame as ‘the pyjama girl’, because of the yellow pyjamas she had been wearing. 

The Pyjama Girl Case is not Agostini’s story, but a 1970s fictionalised version of it. When the partially burned body of a young woman is found in a car wreck on a Sidney beach, the retired Inspector Thomson (Ray Milland) asks to take part in the case. It causes a lot of grumbling amongst his younger colleagues. They think he’s past it, and he thinks they’re overeducated with no real experience, ascribing psychosexual motives to any crime they see. Interwoven with the investigation is the victim’s story. We get to know Glenda Blythe (Dalila di Lazzaro) a few months before her death, a woman who never got a chance to be treated as a human with her own fears, needs and aspirations.

Whilst The Pyjama Girl Case is often called a Giallo, it has few of the genre’s conventions. There are no black-gloved killers, the death count is low, and few gialli concentrate so heavily on their victims. That is the whole point of the film, to the extent that the film’s title seems like a bitter commentary. A young woman who has spent so long trying to assert her own identity has been murdered, and she’s reduced to ‘the pyjama girl’. 

Glenda is caught between three men, a Dane called Roy, an Italian waiter, Antonio, and a much older doctor, Henry. She’s happy to pass between them, making no pretence of monogamy. It seems at first that she’s living her life on her terms, but we rapidly found out how little the men value her. Even though they eventually marry, Antonio can talk throughout the entire scene without realising that she never replies. Roy seems to see her as little more than someone to have sex with. Henry likes to be seen with her in public, but will never do anything for her, except make her the punchline of incredibly insulting jokes. None of them ever consider what she wants, treating her as little more than a convenience that they can use as they want. When she finally does break out for herself, and they are faced with the consequences, none of them can handle it. 

At the same time, Glenda’s self-destructive behaviour shows a lack of strength needed to escape, or even a subconscious belief that she doesn’t deserve to. Whatever the men do, she keeps going back to them, giving them second chances. She agrees to marry Antonio on little more than a whim, which is a terrible idea as she’s shown that she’s not that interested in him, and it will just tie her down (whatever Australian marital laws were like in 1978, there’s more than an implication that society bends heavily in the husband’s favour). Late in the film, she literally prostitutes herself with men she finds repulsive, which can be seen as a form of self-punishment. After trying to escape, she goes back to being treated as an object.

After death, she literally becomes an object on display. Unable to identify her, the police display her naked body to the public like an art exhibit, and the crowds come in to gawk. Only one fainting woman shows any awareness of how horrific the display is. Everyone else just treats Glenda’s body as a new sculpture, and one man tries to take photos.

Whilst Glenda’s story concentrates on four individuals, Inspector Thomson’s investigation shows us the wider world, and it isn’t any more pleasant. The world is filled with masturbating voyeurs, scammers, violent police officers and homosexual perverts. That’s not my opinion of gay people, by the way; it’s the film’s. In one scene, Thomson goes to interview a middle-aged gay man, who is fat, dressed only in a towel from the waist down, and who comes on to Thomson presumably just because Thomson is male. At the end of the scene, we discover that the man has a much younger male lover, and we are clearly meant to be repulsed by it.

This gives The Pyjama Girl Case a strange tension. On the one hand, we have a strong condemnation of the objectifying sexism that refuses to allow women their own autonomy. On the other, we have a strong condemnation of what society is becoming. Thomson is made a retired detective for a reason; being older, he comes from a better world. He alone realises that the man that the police arrest for the murder is not the real killer. He works out what the genuine clues to the mystery are. He is explicitly against displaying Glenda’s corpse to the public, and he criticises younger detectives for having new-fangled psychosexual theories about criminals that don’t work. He’s clearly supposed to be the sympathetic character in the investigation story, all the more so because he’s the underdog. He’s the friendly policeman, whilst the younger Inspector Ramsey is a self-satisfied bureaucrat.

Can the film reconcile these two themes? If the modern world is so terrible, particularly with its emphasis on non-conventional sexual behaviour, where does director Flavio Mogherini think the sexism comes from? The late 1970s were a cynical time for many people and quite a few filmmakers, but wishing for ‘the good old days’, where misogyny was even more rampant, is a strange thing to do. It’s even stranger for a viewer in 2021, who is much less likely to think homosexuality is as perverted as the film does. 

Even if the film’s themes don’t quite mesh, Mogherini is very good at not just suggesting hopelessness through the film’s characters, but through the film’s imagery. The lighting is constantly harsh and alienating, no matter what the weather or the time of day is. Characters can find themselves in the middle of the city, a supposedly bustling metropolis, with nobody else in sight. Glenda and Antonio’s home barely deserves the name, as it just looks like somewhere they go every night. No wonder Glenda wants to escape, though it’s clear early on that there’s nowhere to escape to.

The Pyjama Girl Case is intelligently made, though it can misfire. It’s not clear that Glenda is the murder victim when we first meet her, so if you watch the film cold, it takes some time to realise that Glenda and Thomson’s stories do not take place at the same time. The film’s themes, as I’ve mentioned, appear to conflict, and whilst the story is told well, you might wonder if it’s too cynical to be worth telling. It may be best not to approach it as a giallo at all; it’s really a tragedy about those wounded and killed by an uncaring, self-absorbed society.

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THANKS FOR READING ASHLEY’S REVIEW OF THE PYJAMA GIRL CASE

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