The Girl Can't Help It

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section reads like a review and may need cleanup.
Please help improve this article to make it neutral in tone and meet Wikipedia's quality standards. (talk, help, how to edit)

The Girl Can't Help It

Directed by	Frank Tashlin
Produced by	Frank Tashlin
Written by	Frank Tashlin Herbert Baker
Starring	Tom Ewell Jayne Mansfield Edmond O'Brien
Distributed by	20th Century Fox
Release date(s)	December 1, 1956
Running time	99 minutes
Language	English
IMDb profile

The Girl Can't Help It is a 1956 comedy, musical film, starring Jayne Mansfield, Tom Ewell, and Edmond O'Brien. It was directed by Frank Tashlin, with a screenplay written by Frank Tashlin and Herbert Baker from an uncredited novel Do Re Me by Garson Kanin.

The original music score, including the sizzling title song by Little Richard, was by Bobby Troup, with an additional credit to Ray Anthony for the tune "Big Band Boogie". It was shot in Color (De Luxe), filmed in Cinemascope, and runs 99 minutes.

The script is witty, encapsulating many of the attitudes and opinions of the time, although the storyline is really very simple. A slot machine mobster, Marty "Fats" Murdock (O'Brien) wants his blonde girlfriend, Jerri Jordan (Mansfield), to be a singing star, despite the fact that she seems to have no talent.

In order to achieve this aim, he hires a press agent, Tom Miller (Ewell) to promote her career. He chooses Miller, because of his past success with the career of singer Julie London (a fiction of the script) and the fact that he never makes sexual advances towards his female clients.

Miller reluctantly takes on the job and sets to work by showing her off around numerous night spots and rehearsal rooms in order that she may be seen by those that matter in show business. He merely requires her to move around looking beautiful whilst always dressed in the latest haute-couture fashions.

Miller's machinations arouse interest in Jerri and soon offers of contracts follow. A distraught Miller, terrified of Murdock, twists and turns and uses various ruses to keep him at bay. On top of this, there are the usual misunderstandings, when Mousie, Henry Jones, an associate of the ever jealous Murdock, misleadingly splices a recording of a wiretap between Miller and Jordan to make it seem as if the two have a business — rather than a romantic — connection.

Finally it is discovered that Jerri does have talent, which appears to solve Miller's problems. That is, until Jerri reveals that she is only interested in home and motherhood and that he is the real object of her affection. There is, of course, a happy ending for everyone.

Tom Ewell gives a good performance in his role as Miller, although he is really reprising his role in The Seven Year Itch when he played opposite Marilyn Monroe. He maintains the stoic air of a man struggling against adversity, no mean feat when part of that adversity looked like Jayne Mansfield.

Edmond O'Brien is loud and overbearing as Murdock, but his performance is obviously tongue-in-cheek and he shows a good grasp of comedy in some of his witty asides. Particularly memorable is his sentence, "etcetera, etcetera, etcetera", which is a parody of the same line used by Yul Brynner in the 1956 film The King and I.

Jayne Mansfield merely carries out the role the director has set for her. She utters a series of simple lines and stands or moves around looking beautiful. Her speech about a woman's place being in the home may sound old fashioned, but it was very much the way of thinking in 1956. Tashlin may have kept her role deliberately simple in order not to invite unfair comparisons with Marilyn Monroe, for whom the role may have originally been written. Mansfield's twee gasp was parodied shortly thereafter by the actress herself in the 1957 comedy Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?.

Appearing at the night spots Miller and Jerri visit is a line-up of some of the golden greats of rock & roll, including Little Richard, Fats Domino, The Platters, Gene Vincent & the Blue Caps, and acrobatic pioneer rockers The Treniers, as well as lesser-known artists, such as Eddie Fontaine and The Chuckles, who obtained brief bursts of popularity in 1956 but soon faded. There are even young hopefuls like Teddy Randazzo, who hung around the rock and roll scene for years, but who never became major stars.

The auburn-haired, husky-voiced, sultry singer Julie London is also featured in the film. She appears in Miller's apartment as a haunting, spirit of a love past who follows him from room to room, constantly changing evening dresses and hair styles and singing her Top Ten hit of that year, "Cry Me a River". (A few years later, she would marry Bobby Troup.)

The most memorable scene, however, is probably the one which introduces the film's theme song. In this scene, Jerri walks along the pavement like a fashion model on the catwalk, wearing a tight-fitting, black two-piece costume with matching broad-brimmed hat, gloves, shoes and handbag. All around men are ogling her, the ice on a delivery truck melts and the bottle of milk in a milkman's hand boils as she passes, whilst an unseen Little Richard is belting out, "The Girl Can't Help It" as various special effects match the lyrics, which tell of her effects on all objects: "the menfolk get engrossed...the bread slice turns to toast...the beefsteak become well done...she makes granpa feel like twenty-one...."

The Girl Can't Help It received critical praise at the time and was better regarded than other rock and roll films of the period such as Rock Around the Clock and Don't Knock the Rock, which were really promotional vehicles for Bill Haley & His Comets, and Rock, Rock, Rock which simply collected a bunch of performances around a slight storyline.

These films were considered to have been thrown together to cash in on the Rock & Roll craze and to be merely propaganda for the genre. The Girl Can't Help It was considered to have a stronger storyline than these other films, to feature better known actors and to have the advantage of being shot in color. Some sources call The Girl Can't Help It the first rock and roll film, but its release was predated by Rock Around the Clock; it was, however, the first rock and roll film to be given the same sort of serious treatment as other major musicals of the day.

The Girl Can't Help It was also allowed to poke fun at rock and roll, which the other films were not.

In some scenes, the stockily built Edmond O'Brien wore a plaid dinner jacket of the type favoured at the time by the stockily built Bill Haley and, as a final twist, at the end of the film his character Murdock became a rock and roll singer. His voice was atrocious and his hit record, "Rock Around the Rock Pile," was really an impersonation of what an adult brought up in the Swing Era thought rock and roll sounded like.

Poking fun at this attitude was used to good effect in another scene. Here Miller is pleading with Murdock, over the telephone, that he cannot get Jerri a spot on television as she has no talent. Murdock screams at him to watch the television since, if someone can make a noise like the featured act and get on TV, there should be no problem in getting a TV spot for Jerri. Miller switches on the TV to witness a very young Eddie Cochran singing "Twenty Flight Rock".

The Girl Can't Help It was a box office success at the time and is now a cult film, watched by those who wish to see some of the golden greats of rock and roll as they were then.