Frank Tashlin's experience as a Loony Tunes cartoonist is apparent in his smash hit THE GIRL CAN'T HELP IT.
Tashlin, needing background for his music biz comedy, featured rock 'n' roll acts in performance, some incongrously playing in nightclubs - but he achieved, probably unknowingly, a time-capsule of them at the peak of their power.
Vocalists Julie London and Abbey Lincoln take second place to The Platters, Fats Domino, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran and the incendiary Little Richard singing READY TEDDY and the title song.
Jayne Mansfield had already made five films during 1955 to little success. She was smart enough to accept a starring role in George Axelrod's Broadway comedy WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER? Playing a Monroe-esque star, she was an immediate success and 20th Century Fox - tiring of the real Marilyn's behaviour - signed Jayne up as Tashlin's star.
She certainly delivered the cartoonish sexiness Tashlin wanted.
Shelf or charity shop? A keeper in my DVD storage box. It's an added bonus that - apart from Jayne's swerves & curves and the rock 'n' roll legends - Tashlin delivers a very funny satire on celebrity: a one-time gangster hires a washed-up press agent to transform his girlfriend into a celebrity to take her mind off being a housewife. Tom Ewell, who the previous year had appeared with Marilyn in THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH, plays the press agent - haunted by his former client / girlfriend Julie London singing "Cry Me A River" - and Edmond O'Brien is a comic revelation as the former slot-machine Mr Big who wants his girlfriend to record a song he wrote in jail "Rock Around The Rock Pile". There is also fine support from Henry Jones as the gangster's doleful assistant Mousey. But Tashlin focuses everything on Mansfield in eye-popping Deluxe colour: in her defining screen moment, she wobbles along a pavement in a tight-fitting dress in time to Little Richard singing THE GIRL CAN'T HELP IT, oblivious to her effect on the men she passes: a delivery man's ice melts in his hands, a milkman's pint of milk gushes like champagne and a man's glass-lens' crack. As John Waters says in his appreciation, it had such an effect on his ten year-old mind that he replicated it for Divine in PINK FLAMINGOS... only with the passers-by staring in disbelief and horror! Tashlin would re-team with Mansfield the following year for his excellent screen version of WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER?
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