No, not the queen from Drag Race. That’s Jaymes, and her stage name is a reference to the 1950s starlet, anyway. Although, one could safely argue that Mansfield was doing a drag act in her exaggerated femininity, but that is a different essay.
If every decade gets a screen presence that is endemic of the era, then Jayne Mansfield was the consumerist blonde bombshell for the Atomic Age. With her towering blonde hair (mostly bouffant wigs) and bodily proportions that looked as if engineered in a laboratory, she was a crass screen presence that demanded attention through her wiggles, giggles, and affected voice. In the wake of Marilyn Monroe and her canny gender performance, Mansfield was part of a legion of imitators hired by the various studios to either threaten Monroe or steal a piece of her glory.
Mansfield film career remains a curious thing. Never given the A-list treatment nor was she regulated to the poverty row of Mamie Van Doren or the pale imitations of Monroe vehicles of Sheree North, Mansfield had few chances to demonstrate what she was capable of beneath the blonde bombshell persona. Two of those films are included in this set which tilt her star persona and aggressive imagery upside and inside out, but she was largely decorative in films like Kiss Them for Me, surprisingly effective in The Wayward Bus, and did more low-key work away from her home studio in films like The Burglar.
She was a curious subject as her celebrity, and tragic death, have far surpassed her cinematic legacy. Most folks remember her as a Playboy Playmate, the photo with Sophia Loren, dying in a car crash, or being the mother Mariska Hargitay, and not as a movie star for a brief period of time with a frustrating body of work that has some classics buried in it. Underneath the din of noise about her own entrapping caricature, there was someone who could bloom under the right director.
Released in 2006, the Jayne Mansfield Collection collects three of her films between 1956 to 1958. Two of them are untouchable classics and one of them a fascinating first pass at an emerging genre archetype, Jayne Mansfield Collection offers a quick primer on the 50s studio creation in three of her better vehicles.
Sprinkled with a glossy coat of early rock and roll pioneers appearing for quick cameos, 1956’s The Girl Can’t Help It takes aim at the music industry (namely the payola scandal), the 1950s obsession with breasts, and the deception of appearances. Moreover, with director Frank Tashlin running the show, you know that the whole thing is going to be a slightly bonkers cartoon, like a “Merrie Melodies” turned flesh-and-blood.
The film’s shiny, bright CinemaScope and Technicolor exterior can’t disguise the diseased worldview it holds dear to its heart. The music industry is presented as little more than one part organized criminal activities and one part advertising company in which stars and hit songs are engineered, talent is meaningless, and mass pop-culture is aimed squarely at the dumbest level. Edmund O’Brien’s climatic musical performance sees a group of teenagers staring at him in dead-eyed, open-mouthed adoration.
A large chunk of the film sees O’Brien’s former gangster getting into a revised turf war with another former gangster. This time around instead of disputes about illegal gambling and money laundering, it is about jukeboxes and getting records played. The only logical conclusion to be reached from this is that organized crime and big business as the same thing only separated by various forms of legality.
But these aren’t the only targets that Tashlin sets about satirizing with glee. Mansfield, who else really, plays the unwitting doll to O’Brien’s gangster. Her voluptuous figure and ditzy blonde artifice disguise a woman who is happiest playing homemaker and down-playing her sex appeal. Tashlin appears to have been the only director who not only give Mansfield material to work with, but found the right venue to highlight and support her limited talents as an actress.
But she isn’t the only character to be built upon an artifice that entraps them. Ewell’s drunken talent manager is revealed as being heartbroken after creating Julie London’s career, a drunken night has him being haunted by visions of her singing “Cry Me a River” in his home, changing outfits from room to room as he tries to escape her. We thought he was a schlep, but Ewell’s character is a secret ladies magnet. And while O’Brien’s gangster chomps on cigars and talks tough, he then reveals himself as happiest when indulging his secret passion as a song-and-dance man. The initial exteriors of these characters dissolve slowly as the film goes on, before finally breaking wide open during a climatic concert.
In addition, the film has plenty of fun poking around at the 1950s breast obsession. As Mansfield walks down the street a humorous sequence of events occurs: ice melts, milk bottles ejaculate, a pair of glasses break, and practically every man within a three-mile radius is reduced to the wolf from a Tex Avery cartoon. Another gag sees Mansfield holding two milk bottles over her breasts while talking about how she longs for motherhood. Whether or not this is a one-note joke is up for you to decide. I found it humorous and think that it could work on a few different levels.
On a more surface level of enjoyment, The Girl Can’t Help It features some prime footage of performers like Little Richard, Julie London, Eddie Cochran, Fats Domino, the Platters, and Gene Vincent. It may be poking fun at the music industry, but Girl is also one hell of a rock and roll movie, capturing the rebellious, cartoonish spirit of the early years and blasting it writ large across the silver screen.
Mostly tasked to goof on the “dumb blonde” persona which she designed herself as, and eventually led to her painting her image into a corner, Mansfield seems to be having a grand time poking holes at the conceit. When tasked to bring out the actual woman behind the giggly top-heavy blonde goddess she excels. There is a fragility and battle-scarred soul beneath that helium voice and wiggly body. Her penchant for squealing a lot or trying to talk while inhaling does grate on the nerves since she overdoes these mannerisms, but more often than not, she creates a very vivid portrait of a movie star trapped within the confines of her own self-created myth. And her commitment to that myth is quite extraordinary, from the change in voice and demeanor to the poodle that has its fur dyed to match her various outfits throughout the film. More roles like this might have made her cinematic legacy less of an afterthought.
The plot itself pivots on her publicity stunts to make her TV Tarzan beau jealous. That her real-life paramour Mickey Hargitay plays the TV muscle man is an amusing enough bit that only adds to the meta-commentary of Mansfield and her role. On top of that is the plot revolving around Tony Randall, as advertising man Rockwell Hunter that Mansfield ropes into her publicity schemes. If he plays along with her, she’ll turn around and pay him back by starring in his lipstick ad campaign. That Randall, a nobody on his way to mediocrity at his job, becomes uber-famous for just being photographed with the beautiful star is not a shock, or even much of a satire.
It is once his stock at the company starts to rise just by being around her without having accomplished anything that the darkly comic stuff starts happening. Just by keeping the advertising company in the news, however peripherally, he is continually promoted up the corporate ladder, and the executive bathroom keys become some kind of bourgeois status symbol. However, perhaps the most jaundiced and bluntest of satirical fun is had during the opening credits in which television ads are parodied, culminating in a washing machine getting into a tug-of-war with a spokeswoman.
Or maybe it is the numerous scenes in which Tashlin once again pokes fun at the 1950s obsession with breasts, television, and what success means in America. Mansfield’s presence upends Hunter’s life, obviously, but it also sends his long-time fiancĂ©e into an emotional tailspin. Believing that his publicity stunt romance with Mansfield is real, Betsy Drake spends a significant amount of time trying to expand her bust, culminating in a scene in which she wears a padded bra, a tight sweater, and squeals like a dolphin around Randall’s office as a flirtation tactic to win him back.
Even more acid is thrown upon television during an intermission in which the nature and quality of it is compared less favorably to a movie theater. Randall breaks the fourth wall, speaks with the audience, shrinks the screen, loses the color, and talks up the greatness of television. Tashlin’s out for blood in this sequence, made during the height of Hollywood’s paranoia about television over-taking them as the dominant cultural force. Some of the satire may be blunted for a modern audience, but it is still a very funny conceptual bit of satirical comedy.
Tashlin’s view of success in advertising, hell in America based on this and The Girl Can’t Help It, is suspicious to the point of maniac glee. A climatic scene in which Randall has managed to luck his way into becoming the president of his advertising firm is a glorious convergence of color, acting, and comedy. He stares at his name at the top of the firm’s doors, and they begin to sparkle in various colors. Randall then sees Mansfield dressed in a skimpy bikini covered with bills and coins, giggling and wiggling all over his office. His erotic glee is palpable, and he salivates harder over his business and professional luck than the half-naked pin-up he hallucinates in front of him.
Much of this makes Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? sound like a heartless, pitch-black satire, but the film has a beating, bruised heart in the form of Joan Blondell. Blondell offers up the movie’s lone moment of naked, vulnerable emotional honesty. Normally, Blondell was hired by studios to be the sarcastic, blowsy, tough-talking sidekick dame to the more conventional lead, and she does a similar thing here as Mansfield’s assistant. But in a scene in which Mansfield and Blondell have a heart-to-heart about why Mansfield keeps choosing the wrong men, purposefully remaking ordinary guys into stars in a similar manner to how a Svengali took Mansfield from obscurity to star, Blondell shares a story about a milkman who broke her heart. Amid the various scenarios that equate success with knowingly, or unknowingly but willingly, prostituting yourself in some way, this scene smacks you in the face. It is brief, but it proves that these characters deserve a happy ending for all they have had to endure, and when they get it, they’ve earned it through hellfire and heartbreak.
But Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? always works best whenever it focuses in on Mansfield. Tashlin took her and made her into the cartoonish post-modern vulgar icon of 1950s materialism and breast obsession. No other director was quite so sympathetic to her or knew how to highlight her gifts. Together they created an anarchic sex kitten that was much happier being a sweet, nice girl, and it is a pity that no other vehicle could be made to expand upon this unique spin on the dumb blonde persona. At least these two films endure.
An amiable little bauble of a film with nothing much in mind besides simple entertainments, The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw is one of the better offerings from star Mansfield’s film output. Much like the aforementioned Destry, this too sees a fish-out-of-water sheriff with a penchant for not using firearms taking control of an anarchic town. Instead of James Stewart’s “aw, shucks” pre-war persona, the role is played Kenneth Moore in bumbling British mode. His sheriff is frequently blind to the dangers around him, and his blind luck in negotiating these various scenarios.
It offers up a consistently bemused atmosphere, never truly reaching for anything beyond mild diversions. This is fine, as it does this job with great efficiency Walsh had made better films before this, masterpieces such as White Heat, The Roaring Twenties, The Thief of Bagdad, and Sadie Thompson, but he brings a professionalism and craft that makes the entire thing run like clockwork. It never reaches beyond mere competency, but it is a fine enough diversion while it plays.
By the early-60s, her film career was largely finished, and she had pivoted to nightclubs, performance tours, and performing onstage. Part of the rejection of her as a screen presence was her lackluster material, but her publicity shenanigans, which have an entire Wikipedia article dedicated to them, played just as large a role. It seemed as if audiences at large tired of her antics, including meeting with Anton LaVey, breathy baby voice affectation, and overly friendly relationship with the press.
Essentially, Mansfield’s self-made star image became her own prison, and she later complained in life that the public cared more about her curvy figure than her intellectual pursuits or accomplishments. Her penchant for wearing clothing that “accidentally” broke or revealed a plunging bustline with no bra did her no favors in the sexual hypocrisy of the 1950s. Sure, they wanted to gawk at her, but they did not want her to so openly and cravenly supplicate for their attention and viewing pleasure.
The Los Angeles Times put it pretty succinctly, “She confuses publicity and notoriety with stardom and celebrity and the result is distasteful to the public.” Nine short years after The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw, Mansfield was playing small clubs across the country where she did her revue, which often included her shimmying out of dresses that revealed nude illusions beneath. It was during this tour that she played her final gig at the Gus Stevens Supper Club. Despite popular belief, she was not decapitated. She died from severe head trauma in the car accident, and the urban legend came from an accident police photo that showed what was probably her wig near the scene. She was only 34.
My personal introduction to her came in the form of song lyrics,
including Blondie’s “Platinum Blonde” and Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Kiss Them
for Me.” My initial reference points for her were largely gleaned from her infamous
stunts and notoriety rather than whatever skillset she had to get her into the
public consciousness in the first place. Then I watched a few of her films and
found that she had untapped potential as a comedienne, could do solid enough
dramatic work, and seemed to drink in the camera’s gaze and affection.
Mansfield deserved better in a variety of ways, but she also symbolizes her heyday
in ways that have already been enumerated.
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