Little Richard is looking uncomfortable on the stage—odd since it is 1956 and he’s in his prime. Admittedly, his audience is all white people in formal wear. He looks like a spring wound too tightly, like he’s barely restraining an urge to completely let loose. What I like best is there is a bit of his magnificent coif is flying free, as if some part of him managed to escape.
He is one of many musicians lip-syncing to studio tracks in The Girl Can’t Help It. Although not necessarily a jukebox musical, it does drop in performances from a great many acts of the era, and those moments vary in the extent to which they are diegetic.
Most of the acts perform in various clubs. Characters watch Eddie Cochran perform “Twenty Flight Rock” on television. The Treniers are supposedly shown in the process of recording in a studio. Fats Domino and then The Platters in concert. Eddie Cochran and The Blue Caps perform “Be Bop a Lu La” in a practice room.
None of these performances are live, but it is still great music and it is nice to see these artists when they were young. These moments are similar to early music videos.
The weirdest performance will be during a recording session where Ray Anthony fronts his big band. Nothing he does is strange. Instead, it’s the ear-piercing siren sound made by Jayne Mansfield at only two points in the track. In one shot, we see her sheet music has exactly two notes on it, and they are spaced very far apart. I laughed longer at this visual joke than I have laughed at anything in a long time.
A has-been gangster played by Edmund O’Brien is determined to make her a star, without either or them having any idea what talents she might possess. Fearing anybody chosen to manage her will be distracted by her cantilevered physiology, he chooses Tom Ewell, playing a washed-up agent with a sterling reputation for never hitting on his female clients.
Fats Murdock, O’Brien’s character, may be a few decades past the era when he ran a crime syndicate, but that only means he had the instincts and ruthlessness to outlive the competition. He gives Ewell a tour of his mansion on Long Island, pointing out where this or that guy got whacked. On the way there, Mansfield had thoughtfully informed her agent that O’Brien had just put new carpets down throughout the place. When Ewell discovers she can’t sing, he expresses his relief with, “I didn’t want a part in making you into something you didn’t want to be. I didn’t want Fats to buy another carpet on account of me.”
Despite all the music numbers, and strong performances from O’Brien and Ewell, this really is Mansfield’s show. I started to write something about how only a smart person can play a dumb character so well, except the person she plays here is pretty sharp. This is a stronger performance than that in the next film she would make with director Frank Tashlin, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? In that movie, I could tell the actress was in on the joke. In this movie, I felt like both she and her character were in on it.
There are some visual gags centered around her hourglass figure. When she walks by an ice delivery man, the huge block under his hands melts into a small flood. A bottle held by the milkman positively ejaculates its contents as she passes by. Not even the prepubescent newspaper boy is immune to her appeal: “If she’s a girl, then I don’t know what my sister is”.
Similar to Hunter, there is a slyly subversive opening sequence. This picture starts out in black-and-white and in the narrow Academy ratio. Ewell addresses the audience directly and flicks his fingers first to one side and then the other as the screen expands to CinemaScope proportions. He also testily has to repeat the announcement the picture is in color by DeLuxe before it finally transitions to color.
And what weird colors they are. Unlike the rival three-strip Technicolor process, DeLuxe used only one negative. The downside is the colors weren’t as precise as what one would get from the other system. The result is blues and reds run towards the downright lurid, while peach, pink, purple and teal dominate the rest of the color field. This makes for some memorable, if bizarre, visuals. My favorite color is teal, but that doesn’t mean I would paint a room in it.
The best use of color is employed at the beginning of Abbey Lincoln’s musical number. She wears a dress of eye-searing red, while standing before curtains that are so deeply blue as to be almost featureless. At first, there isn’t light directly on her, so we get this ethereal glow around the edges of her skin. It is a stunning visual.
I may have thoroughly enjoyed the next feature Tashlin did after The Girl Can’t Help It, but this earlier film is vastly superior. Similar rock’n’roll jukebox musicals of its time are little remembered today, but this movie does more than rock—it is an engrossing romantic comedy. Those who are interested should spring for the Criterion Collection disc, which is packed with fascinating special features and even includes a reproduction of a how-to brochure authored by Tashlin for the benefit of would-be cartoonists.
Dir: Frank Tashlin
Starring Jayne Mansfield, Tom Ewell, Edmund O’Brien
Watched on Criterion Collection blu-ray