DVD/150: THE GIRL CAN'T HELP IT (Frank Tashlin, 1956)

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?

 

DVD/150: THE GRIFTERS (Stephen Frears, 1990)

Stephen Frears followed DANGEROUS LIAISONS with another tale of deceit, sex and death, Jim Thompson's THE GRIFTERS.

Crime writer Donald Westlake superbly adapts Thompson's terse tale of a trio of grifters' dark dealings in the LA sunshine.

They first appear memorably in split-screen: Lilly works for the mob around California racetracks, fixing the odds with last-minute betting (creaming some off the top for herself), Roy is her estranged son who works short-time cons while his new girlfriend Myra is also a con-artist, using her body if she has to.

Roy is beaten when a scam goes wrong, Lilly visits him for the first time in eight years and discovers him in pain so has him hospitalized.  Lilly and Myra meet over Roy's hospital bed, instantly disliking each other.

When Roy dumps Myra for suggesting him and Lilly are too close, Myra's revenge changes all their lives...

Shelf or charity shop?  One for the shelf: produced by Martin Scorsese, Stephen Frears delivers an excellent Film Noir which brings the form from the 1950s into 1990 Los Angeles.  A fabulous sense of place surrounds Westlake's hard-boiled adaptation while Frears has the best cast to reference the old while bringing the new: John Cusack's baby-faced Roy subtly delivers the Montgomery Clift-style dude who thinks he can control his destiny.  Both Anjelica Huston and Annette Bening totally deserved their Academy Award nominations as the duelling scorpions Lilly and Myra.  Bening is wonderfully good while conjuring up Gloria Grahame amoral sexuality - I think it's her most memorable screen role.  Anjelica Huston brings a flavour of the intensity of Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford to Lilly but with an icy remoteness that is chilling and all her own - she is frightening while in control and terrifying when she loses it.  They are surrounded with a wonderful supporting cast of character actors including Henry Jones, Pat Hingle, JT Walsh, Charles Napier and Stephen Tobolowsky.

DVD/150: WIDOWS (Ian Toynton, 1983, tv)

Accept no substitute: there's only one WIDOWS. 

A security van heist goes disasterously wrong, leaving the three robbers dead.  The ringleader was known criminal Harry Rawlins so his widow Dolly is harrassed by the vengeful Inspector Resnick and by the Fisher brothers who were her husband's rivals.

Dolly finds her husband's ledgers and decides that she will attempt the robbery again with the two other gang members' widows: headstrong Linda and insecure Shirley.  Dolly - and Resnick - realise there was a fourth gang member who obviously escaped.  Dolly recruits Linda's friend Bella, a cool-headed stripper to complete her gang. 

Can the widows keep ahead of the police, the criminals and the mysterious surviving gang member - and still trust each other?

Debut writer Lynda La Plante's idea was nurtured by producer Linda Agran and Verity Lambert of Euston Pictures and WIDOWS has the trademark gritty London realness of Euston's finest work.

Shelf or charity shop? You 'avin' a larf?  There is a reason why WIDOWS attracted audiences of 18 million viewers and it still grips like a vice thanks to Ian Toynton's spare direction, La Plante's memorable characters and the terse performances from actors of the calibre of David Calder, Kate Williams and Maurice O'Connell among others.  Fiona Hendley and Maureen O'Farrell's performances as Shirley and Linda are over-shadowed by Eva Mottley's gimlet-eyed Bella and Ann Mitchell as Dolly Rawlins - one of the great television performances of the 1980s.  Watching WIDOWS now is bittersweet as in 1985, Mottley pulled out of the filming of the WIDOWS sequel citing racial and sexual abuse from the production team and was later found dead of an overdose aged only 31, a tragic waste of a real talent.