User Reviews

Along with Peggy Lee's "Fever",Julie London's "Cry me a river" defined chick cool in the 1950s and co-existed on Jukeboxes with Elvis,Bill Haley and Buddy Holly.This marked the start of the rock 'n' roll era,an age almost totally dominated by male artistes.These two sophisticated ladies were the rearguard of the previous fashion,the "Big Band" years. More rhythmically subtle and harmonically complex than the rhythm and blues derived music that succeeded it the Big Band sound clings on determinedly fifty years later whereas rock 'n' roll as such scarcely exists in its original form having evolved in a few short years to the all - enveloping "rock".Acts like Little Richard and Fats Domino may be admired in retrospect but their music is not much played by young people today."The girl can't help it" offers a rare chance to see them in their pomp and also sample the popular music that preceded them. As a movie per se it doesn't have a lot of merit.Tom Ewell's drunken cynic act is a bit worn and the ill - starred Jayne Mansfield is willing and good - natured but lacks the personality and talent required by her part.Edmond O' Brien has no discernible gift for comedy - a handicap you might think in a film that is supposed to be one. But I doubt if you'll be watching it for them.You can enjoy a cornucopia of black acts many of whom would not have been allowed in through the front doors of the venues they were appearing at during that so - called golden age of music.Apart from the aforementioned messrs Richard and Domino you have Abbey Lincoln - married to jazz drummer and activist Max Roach,The Platters,The Trenniers all putting upstarts like Eddie Cochrane firmly in their place. Rock 'n' Roll,they used to say,is here to stay.Well,unfortunately it wasn't.You would listen in vain for Rock 'n' Roll in the charts in 2007. But here,brilliantly photographed in exquisite colour,are some of its earliest and most influential proponents reminding us of what all the excitement was about half a century ago.

Frank Tashlin made the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons and you know, that's pretty much what this movie is. It's a cartoon come beautiful and wonderfully to life. He'd work with Jerry Lewis on six of his solo films (Rock-A-Bye Baby, The Geisha Boy, Cinderfella, It's Only Money, Who's Minding the Store? and The Disorderly Orderly) and then work with Jayne Mansfield again on the movie Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? He also wrote the Don Knotts film The Shakiest Gun in the West.

I knew I would love this movie in the first few seconds, when Tom Ewell introduces the film by showing how CinemaScope and the colors by DeLuxe work. It's an astounding moment that breaks the fourth wall before it has even been built.

A mobster who runs the slots, Marty "Fats" Murdock (Edmond O'Brien), has one dream. He wants his girl, Jerri Jordan (Mansfield), to be a singer. She has no talent, but he knows that press agent Tom Miller (Ewell, who is best known for The Seven Year Itch and whose last movie was Rodney Dangerfield's Easy Money) can get the job done. Even better, he never hits on his clients.

Murdock is obsessed with a song he wrote, "Rock Around the Rock Pile," and Miller has to go to enemy territory and sell the song to another mobster, Wheeler (John Emery, Kronos), who rules the jukeboxes.

There's all manner of romantic confusion and a gang war over jukeboxes, which was actually a thing once. All ends well, with Jerri confessing that she really can sing and Murdock letting her know that he doesn't want to marry her, so she can go off and be with Tom, the man she loves. The wedding dress that Mansfield wears here was loaned to her for her wedding to Mickey Hargitay.

Oh yeah - and Juanita Moore, from Imitation of Life, is in this. That's what normal folks know her from. Me, I recognized her as Momma from Abby right away.

The real reason to watch this - beyond the rainbow of colors ready to bathe your eyes in perfect beauty and majesty - are the performances by Fats Domino, Little Richard, Eddie Cochran, The Platters, Gene Vincent, Eddie Fontaine and more.

In The Beatles Anthology, Paul McCartney discusses how John Lennon learned how to play guitar from watching Cochran in this movie. It meant so much to them that they cut the recording of "Birthday" at Abbey Road Studios short to watch its 1968 British TV debut. Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck also claimed that this movie was a big influence.

Speaking of influence, some feel that Elvis was directly inspired by the dancing for "Rock Around the Rockpile," which was somewhat of an imitation of him anyway, and may have used the look of this scene when he made Jailhouse Rock. The makers of The Girl Can't Help It wanted Elvis for this film, but dealing with Colonel Tom Parker proved to be too much to deal with, as his asking price for one Elvis song was too expensive.

Want to love this movie even more? Listen to John Waters discuss it on the British DVD release. He would also tell the Directors Guild of America Quarterly, "This wasn't a movie that my boy classmates wanted to see or cared about. They weren't interested in discussing Jayne Mansfield's complete lack of roots. I really had no one that I could be enthusiastic with about it. So it was a private secret of mine, this movie."

Waters based so much of the character of Divine - she would even come on stage to the song "The Girl Can't Help It" - from Mansfield. He also points out that Little Richard's mustache in this movie had such an impact on him that he's had it for his entire life.