THE GIRL CAN'T HELP IT: Blu-ray (2oth Century-Fox, 1956) Criterion

I remain at a loss to explain the longevity of Jayne Mansfield, the buxom sexpot/singer and Playboy centerfold who, until her untimely death in a hellish automobile accident in 1967, was renowned the world over as a sort of road show Marilyn Monroe (both gals, residents of the 2oth Century-Fox stable). Oh, that Zanuck. He certainly could pick ‘em. Better known for her publicity stunts, often in cahoots with her second hubby, bodybuilder, Mickey Hargitay, Mansfield’s big launch into filmdom, director Frank Tashlin’s The Girl Can’t Help It (1956) is a fairly pedestrian concern, its merits, Mansfield’s sybaritic slink, cavorting in Cinemascope, along with a slew of rock n’ roll legends doing what they did best in their own time. I am still trying to discern whether the proverbial ‘casting couch’ had its hand (other appendages optional) getting Mansfield up to speed with Monroe’s rep – decidedly her biggest ‘rival’, if for no other reason, than Mansfield looked, sounded and behaved like Monroe reincarnated. You know what they say about imitation being the cheapest form of flattery? And certainly, one would be hard pressed to promote Mansfield to such A-list glossy fare based on the results of her first picture, Female Jungle (1955) – a C-grade nothing, shot in just under 10 days.

From this inauspicious debut, and some rather shameless PR, manager/publicist, James Byron fashioned a 7-year contract for Mansfield at Warner Brothers where she appeared to no notice in Pete Kelly's Blues, then, with as little fanfare in Hell on Frisco Bay and finally, in a walk-on in the B-grade noir, Illegal (all made and released in 1955). At this juncture, Mansfield's agent, William Shiffrin landed a deal for Warners to loan Mansfield to appear on Broadway as Rita Marlowe in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? While the run of the play was a minor hit, Jack Warner elected to allow Mansfield’s studio contract to lapse. And thus, when it came time to reprise her role, the picture’s rights were sold to Fox instead, and where Mansfield, once again, commanded a lucrative 6-year contract. To suggest Fox had big plans for Mansfield is a bit much. Moreover, they saw her as a Marilyn Monroe clone, someone they could plug-n-play into the sort of roles they had hoped to cast their increasingly temperamental other platinum beauty, and thus keep the fantasy of the bubble-headed sex goddess alive and well…and continuously cranking out the hits for their studio.

Mansfield is Jerri Jordan in The Girl Can't Help It – a project originally titled Do-Re-Mi to capitalize on the prolific roster of then contempo rock-n-roll and R&B artists set to appear: Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Fats Domino, The Treniers, Nino Tempo, The Platters and Little Richard among them. While the plot, nimbly co-scripted by Tashlin and Herbert Baker is pretty witless and willy-nilly, the picture nevertheless managed to outgross Gentlemen Prefer Blondes – Monroe’s infinitely more revivable and vivacious hit maker from 1953. And thus, Fox publicity wasted no time in marketing Mansfield as their ‘king-sized’ Monroe doppelganger.  And the parallels between the two did not stop there. Mansfield’s costar, Tom Ewell had already appeared with Marilyn in Fox’s The Seven Year Itch (1955), and pretty much reprises the role of a harried/love-sick fop for Mansfield’s benefit herein. If everything from the story to the performances seem grotesquely cartoonish, it’s little wonder. The picture’s director, Frank Tashlin had his start as an animator, first for Leon Schlesinger and then, contracted to Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies, coming up with various sight gags in a stint to last out his teenage years from 1930 to 1946.

Tashlin left the ink-and-paint sect behind to write material for the Marx Brothers, Lucille Ball, Bob Hope and Red Skelton before embracing the self-same mania of his animated shorts in his feature flicks, heavily weighted in breakneck slapstick. Tashlin’s directorial foray, picking up the baton from director, Sidney Lanfield to finish Hope’s The Lemon Drop Kid (1951) proved a winner. Nevertheless, he would not direct again until The Girl Can’t Help It, the picture’s satire and sex appeal getting Tashlin off to a rare start in Hollywood, followed by commercial hits for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, as well as Mansfield’s follow-up, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, not to mention Tashlin guiding Lewis' solo career through 6 of the comedian’s most fondly recalled movies: Rock-A-Bye Baby, The Geisha Boy (both in 1958), Cinderfella (1960), It's Only Money (1962), Who's Minding the Store? (1963), and The Disorderly Orderly (1964). Particularly in the fifties, Tashlin’s pull on the pulse of American cinema garnered high praise from the intellectually-driven French film magazine, Cahiers du Cinéma, which Tashlin openly dismissed as chichi tripe. In the mid-60’s Tashlin’s uber-gloss fell spectacularly out of favor, his final movie, 1968’s The Private Navy of Sgt. O'Farrell (co-starring Bob Hope and Phyllis Diller), making quite a thud at the box office.

The Girl Can’t Help It begins in earnest when gambling mobster, Marty ‘Fats’ Murdock (Edmond O'Brien) embarks upon a plan to launch his buxom gal/pal, Jerri Jordan as a singer, despite her laughable lack of talent. To this end, Fats hires booze-happy press agent, Tom Miller (Tom Ewell) to promote Jordan. In his prime, Miller had great success with singer, Julie London. But Fats has hired Tom for another reason – because he never gets ‘involved’ with his female clients. Miller markets his protégée to numerous nightclubs. Before long, several managers chomp at the bit. At this juncture, Jerri drops a bomb. She doesn’t want success. She just wants to become somebody’s happy homemaker.  Miller is empathetic and tries to coax Fats into seeing things Jerri’s way. Alas, Fats thinks Jerri is just what his song, ‘Rock Around the Rock Pile’ (a transparent riff on Bill Hailey’s Rock Around the Clock) needs. Reluctantly, Miller complies. Jerri plays the part of a prison siren in the song, and Miller skulks off to Chicago to promote it to Wheeler (John Emery), an ex-mob rival with a monopoly on the jukebox industry. However, Fats is highly suspicious of Miller's reluctance. He is also aware Jerri enjoys Miller’s company. So, he has his ‘associate’, Mousie (Henry Jones) wiretap their phones. Too bad for Fats, Mousie has a heart, quietly editing out the romantic banter between the two, leaving Fats to believe their relationship is strictly platonic.

In Chicago, Wheeler is impressed with Miller’s demo of Rock Around The Rock Pile…that is, until he learns the songwriter is his ex-rival. Wheeler throws Miller out on his ear, and vows none of his jukeboxes will ever play ‘that song’ again. So, Fats bullies bar owners into buying jukeboxes from him, stuffing their record collections with Jerri’s debut. To thwart the song’s appeal, Wheeler arranges to have Fats bumped off during a live rock n’ roll show to mark Jerri’s big television debut.  On route to the theater, Fats confides in Mousie – he no longer wishes to be Jerri’s lover. A sheepish Mousie reveals to his boss the love that has been steadily brewing between Jerri and Miller. Now, Jerri drops her second bomb. She can really sing, but didn’t want to have a career. A nervous Miller decides he cannot keep up the ruse any longer. He confronts Fats with his affections for Jerri. Much to his relief, Fats not only gives his blessing to their pending marriage but offers to be Miller’s best man.  Alas, Wheeler’s assassins arrive on the scene, forcing Fats to wing it on stage before a live audience to spare his life. Miraculously, he can sing too, and Wheeler, sensing it is better to exploit than murder, signs his old rival to a long-term contract. As Miller and Jerri smooch on their honeymoon, a TV in the background reveals Fats and Mousie have since become pop sensations.

I can’t help it - The Girl Can’t Help It did absolutely nothing for me. It’s a time capsule – yes – and expertly tricked out in Cinemascope and color by DeLuxe. However, in virtually every way, it is a fairly transparent hand-me-down whose appeal is very much ‘of the moment’ rather than timelessly enchanting. I suspect Mansfield performed much of it on autopilot, reading life-sized cue cards being held up for her benefit in the wings. Mansfield knows her way around some fairly explicit double entendre, caressing a pair of milk bottles pressed firmly against her even firmer breasts. And Tom Ewell, as ever, is an amiable fop. What The Seven Year Itch denied his married/harried hubby on holiday (the opportunity to wind up with Marilyn Monroe in the final reel), The Girl Can’t Help It pays off in dividends, if only with his second-best chance for happily ever after – a Monroe wannabe. The basis for the picture, Garson Kanin’s short story, Do Re Mi, was initially assigned to the studio’s resident writer/director, Nunnally Johnson before slipping into Tashlin’s hot little hands. Kanin, alas, was not impressed, insisting not only his name be stricken from the picture’s credits, but any and all references to its source material be expunged. With a change of title, Tashlin and Fox happily complied. Receiving mixed reviews upon its theatrical release, The Girl Can’t Help It proved a sizable hit, grossing $6.2 million against its $1.2 million outlay.  Weirdly, the picture is credited with having inspired at least two Beatles – John Lennon and Paul McCartney – in their song-writing endeavors, as well as to have influenced Elvis Presley’s famous ‘Jailhouse Rock’ number in the MGM movie of the same name, released one year after The Girl Can’t Help It.

Viewed today, The Girl Can’t Help It is inconsequential candy floss with a beat. The Tashlin/Baker tale is reminiscent of Kanin’s runaway play, Born Yesterday (1950), but without Kanin’s finesse or the star of that show, Judy Holliday, to infer an uber-sophisticated, deft handling of comedy as the blonde idiot on the cusp of recognizing her own girl power. We’ll give kudos here to Tony and Golden Globe winner, Tom Ewell – an unprepossessing physical specimen who, nevertheless, proved to be the right man at the right time, cast opposite no less than three reigning sexpots of his generation in their prime, the aforementioned Monroe, Mansfield herein, and, Sheree North, in The Lieutenant Wore Skirts (1956). Very nice work if you can get it. Indeed!

The Girl Can’t Help It arrives on Blu-ray via Criterion. Is it just me or does this picture fly in the face of Criterion’s mantra about preserving movies that are culturally and historically significant as cornerstones of international cinema? This one is borrowing from another flawed transfer culled from the now defunct 2oth Century-Fox Home Video apparatus, a 1080p offering likely prepared during the era when someone wasn’t paying attention and leaning much too hard on the blue/teal push in the color spectrum. For those unaware of what I am referring to herein – a good many vintage Fox/Cinemascope Blu-ray releases between 2016 and 2019 were marred by a horrendous imbalance in color – the scans leaning either severely to a teal or blue bias at the expense of virtually every other color that ought to have been represented in these remasters. The Girl Can’t Help It leans to the blue – at times, with the same distracting sacrifice of other colors originally present in the DeLuxe painterly palette. Is it awful? Let’s just say, it is decidedly NOT the way this movie looked in 1956.

The pluses? The image is pristine and free of age-related artifacts. But contrast is also toggled down. The image is frequently deep, to downright dark. Watching in a completely darkened room helps to mitigate squinting. But boosting contrast on your projector or TV just bleaches the rest of the scenes. Don’t try it. It doesn’t work!  I am not entirely certain what happened to the audio mix either. As with all early Cinemascope releases, Fox heavily promoted the fact ‘scope’ offered directionalized 4-track magnetic stereo. Alas, this Blu-ray gets a PCM 1.0 mono. It sports excellent fidelity and dialogue is always crisp sounding. But 1.0?!? Not even 2.0 rechanneled?!? Huh?!?! Extras include an audio commentary from historian, Toby Miller, a barely 17-min. promo for Cinemascope, newly produced with historian, David Cairns, who tries to convince us the blue push here is indigenous to Fox ‘scope’ product. Dear Mr. Cairns. There is blue a la vintage DeLuxe color, and then there is a digitally engineered blue caste, which is what we have here. There’s a difference. A big one!!! Look at the reds - they are Chinese orange, not candy-apple or fire engine. Look at the yellows - muted. Look at the spectral highlights in hair, cement and grey flannel trousers - they have a robin egg blue caste. That's NOT vintage DeLuxe color. And nothing you can say will make it so. But I digress, we also get a 21-min. John Waters’ interview from 2004, a half-hour/newly produced discussion panel with DJs Dave Abramson and Gaylord Fields, nearly 15-mins. with Mansfield biographer, Eve Golden, and, a full hour, 2017 podcast with Karen Longworth. Add to this, archival material, totaling another half hour, plus printed critiques and essays, and, you have one of Criterion’s most comprehensive assemblages of extras for any Blu-ray release from this past year, arguably, for a movie that doesn’t rate it. The visual presentation of the feature, while crisp, is nevertheless flawed. Judge and buy accordingly.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

2.5

VIDEO/AUDIO

3

EXTRAS

5+