During the sixties, Jayne Mansfield tried her damndest to be another Marilyn Monroe. She thought that having a large bosom, dying her hair platinum blonde and speaking in a whispery, little girl voice that she would be a cinch to play in major productions like Marilyn Monroe was doing in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" or "Bus Stop." But alas. Jayne would do any type of publicity that would get her name in the news--which meant she eagerly opened super markets, pizza parlors, massage parlors and used car dealerships.
Now and then, she would appear in a movie. At first, she lucked out with major productions like "The Girl Can't Help It," but it soon became obvious that she had only one major asset at that point: her impressive breast work.
So I was eager to watch her in a "serious" role in this movie which was included in a 50-movie drive-in movie boxed set.
Alas, what I saw was so excruitiating, I had to stop watching after 40 minutes. It was like viewing two different movies. The most boring story dominates, unfortunately, between two boring, miserable characters "Flo" and "Charley" that looks like an entirely different script. We watch endless minutes of them staring at each other, occasionally saying bright stuff like, "Hey Flo." And then "Hey Charley." Dorothy Keller plays Flo, doing her best imitation of Thelma Ritter or a Bronx housewife. There's nothing remotely interesting in her story except she's single and sighs a lot and in one inexplicable scene, she brings Charley an old fish that she's wrapped up in her pocketbook and gives it to him. Charley is played by Fabian Dean, an actor we've never heard of, who actually screams at the window because it's storming outside and shouts out stuff like, "What are you trying to do?"
Finally, we see Jayne Mansfield. In some scenes she wears a terrible blonde wig that looks like a blanket of white straw. In her big scene, though, now inexplicably a brunet with a large lock falling over her eyes, she acts as if she were in a high school drama. Charley is listening to her talk about her bad luck life as if he were awaiting a root canal. She goes on and on, weeping and staring fixedly at the camera as if awaiting the tiny crew to applaud her.
The production isn't helped with the literally threadbare sets--cardboard walls, freshly painted, a few accessories. In one scene in a nightclub, we watch Flo and Charley meet and stare at each other while on the stage is a supposedly go-go girl who wears a regular sweater and skirt.
Jayne died before the production was complete and this movie lay on the shelf for a long time before Jayne's husband and director of this movie, Matt Cimber, took it off the shelf and added the horrible padding of another story played by Doris Keller and Fabian Dean.
The movie starts with a long, long tribute to Jayne and this movie by gossip columnist, Walter Winchell who is treated to a huge close-up at the end--probably at his request as part of his movie deal.
This film is so grim and depressing, as if it reflects Jayne Mansfield's life at that period of her life because she was killed in a car crash on her way to a cheap nightclub in Tennessee. By this time, she was relying on alcohol and probably drugs and had long outgrown her "blonde bombshell" period.
Watching this drive-in flick once was more than enough. But in all the ads Jayne is the one we see prominently but her brief role here is pathetically small.
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