Rockin' with Jayne

New York City's Film Forum is currently showing a few Jayne Mansfield flicks as part of a Frank Tashlin festival (Link). I saw The Girl Can't Help it this week and was seriously moved by the talents of Ms. Mansfield (according to some agitated guy in the lobby her talents were bigger and real-er than any other starlet of her day). The film is busting with music as well. Gene Vincent, Fats Domino, the Platters, and Little Richard all make appearances. Some YouTuber has cut out these musical moments from the movie so you can rock out too. Watch Gene Vincent (link), the Platters (link), Fats Domino (link), Little Richard (link), and Eddie Cochran (link).

Comments

[jima]

We had a similar, or possibly the same, festival play here in Chicago a couple of months ago. It looks like the current film showing is Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, which is pretty excellent. Loads of talent on display. Plus, I think Steinski sampled a Jayne Mansfield squeal from that film in his "Nothing To Fear" mix. Definitely check it out if you can.

[Stevie D.]

That's an impressive play list for the day (or any day, I 'spose). Have to admit I haven't seen much of Ms. Mansfield's work though.

-Stevie D. (http://lazycomic.blogspot.com/)

[bartelby]

Are those her measurements on the back of the chair?

[lorac]

Pink vinyl Jane in Las Vegas: http://flickr.com/photos/gables/227625698/

[Johnny]

--Bosley Crowther, in his NY Times review of the film, referred to Little Richard a "diminutive South Sea islander."
--Someone else has said of the "Be Bop A Lula" performance "They look like they just got back from committing a murder or or are heading out to commit one right after the song."

[Parq]

Who knew Little Richard ever stood so still while performing? Elton John, in *his* early days, was more animated. Hell, the *animated* Little Richard (in the closing title sequence of the mid-90s kidflick "Casper") was more animated!

And Bartelby, the short answer is "yes".

[King Kong]

If those are herr mesurments, they match Barbie's©

[RonPrice]

This is a more general comment on Jayne Mansfield who came into my life just as my libido was coming online back in the fifties. This prose-poem links Jayne, my life and my value and belief system into one literary package.
______________________
INSATIABLE NEED

In October 1957 Hollywood actress and western sex symbol Jayne Mansfield went on a 16-country tour of Europe for 20th Century Fox. She was presented to Queen Elizabeth on November 4th. "You are looking so beautiful," she said to the Queen. The Queen replied, "Thank you very much indeed. So are you." November 4th 1957 was a significant day to Baha'is around the world. On that day Shoghi Effendi passed away. Mansfield was at the top of her acting career in 1957 and won a Golden Globe award that year for Most Promising Newcomer: Female thanks to her performance as a 'wistful derelict' in The Wayward Bus. This movie was generally conceded to have been her best acting or so announced the New York Times. Her career from then on was fitful and hampered by her flamboyant image, squeaky voice, "a soft-voiced coo punctuated with squeals" as one writer put it. She had an almost comically voluptuous figure and limited acting range, as another critic put it.

Still, after 1957, Mansfield remained a highly visible personality and, the year I joined the Bahá’í Faith, 1959, she won a Golden Laurel for Top Female Musical Performance for her role in the U.K.-produced movie The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw, a western spoof. That same year she appeared in Too Hot To Handle. In the late 1950s Mansfield also generated a great deal of negative publicity due to her repeatedly successful attempts to expose what many felt were Hollywood's most impressive breasts. The year my pioneering life began in the Bahá’í community, 1962, Mansfield appeared in It Happened In Athens. Despite receiving top billing, Mansfield was relegated to a colorful, scantily-clad supporting role.

Dissatisfied with her film roles, Mansfield and her husband headlined at the Dunes in Las Vegas in an act called The House of Love for which the actress earned $35,000 a week. It proved to be such a hit that she extended her stay and 20th-Century Fox Records subsequently released the show as an album in 1962. It was called Jayne Mansfield Busts Up Las Vegas. In 1963 Mansfield became the first American mainstream actress to appear in the nude with a starring role in the film Promises! Promises! Photographs of a naked Jayne Mansfield on the set were published in Playboy. She enjoyed much box-office success in 1963 and was voted one of the Top 10 Box Office Attractions by an organization of American theater owners. For the Baha'is 1963 was a year of much significance: the election of its first international body known as the Universal House of Justice. And so began five "decades of struggle…no longer sustained by the guiding hand of Shoghi Effendi."1-Ron Price with thanks to "Jayne Mansfield," Wikipedia Encyclopedia, 11 December 2006 and 1The Universal House of Justice, Century of Light, Bahá’í World Centre, 2001, p. 108.

Jayne died seven weeks before I left
home to live on Baffin Island in my
own turbulent life, significantly less
troubled or….endowed than Jayne's.
She had movie roles in those years
at the start of the Kingdom of God,
the years of the first two international
Plans: 1953-1963 and 1964-1973…...

Then, on November 4th 1957,
the day when that shining face
which illumined the horizons
of the world shone no more,
when the offspring of that mind:
interpreter and co-sharer in the
genius of divine interpretation
could direct & guide his trust
no more--Jayne met the Queen,
an event which also satisfied
and transcended her need of
the moment, served the future
as well as the present and met
her insatiable need for publicity--
his insatiable need had always been
a relentless, exacting one for data.1

1 Glenford E. Mitchell, "The Literature of Interpretation," World Order, Winter 1972-3, p. 24.

Ron Price
11 December 2006

[RonPrice]

FULL-FIGURED GALS

As I went through my teens and became an adult in 1965, there were many stunningly beautiful women who came across my television and cinema screens: Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren, Jayne Mansfield, Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly, Deborah Kerr, Jane Russell and Farrah Fawcette to name a few. This was the ninth and the first years of the tenth stage of history from a Baha’i perspective. In my 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s, from the 1960s through the 1990s, many more beautiful women continued to flow into and out of the mass media.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs,27/2/05
______________
Symbol of an entire sexual revolution
they were, each of them in their way--
and I was only twelve, thirteen, fourteen
and I kept getting older and they kept coming.Embodiments of steamy sexual desire,smouldering sensuous beauty, lusty busty, leggy, curves everywhere, cleavages deep as the dark oceans, full-figured gals they were,one and all, alluring angels, always seductive,
physical powerhouses, big-chested cutiepies, attracted men, photographers and headlines--didn’t they all?

Princesses of pout, icons,
countesses of come hither--
35-23-35 stats and more,
everywhere more, glamour galore,
tending to many marriages and troubles,
temptresses: who could resist
the pulchritude?

All my life they’ve been coming,
always coming, up and out there,
flaunting themselves before my eyes--
incredible things I can only look at,
from a great distance, get turned on by,
but never, absolutely never, get near, or touch the merchandise.

Part of the whirlwind of the senses
they were at the other end of dull-everydayness,its continuum of quotidian time meeting as it did like out of some blue the psychedelic, where tension was increased always without resolution, catharsis or any genuine epiphany.
Sex: the last frontier, extraordinary incident, outrageous stimulation, instinctual sources of erotic heat,
part of some basic permissiveness
where one looks longingly in this inchoate world,diffuse, so diffuse,
where a truly powerful ideology
was just opening up a new vision
of life, part of a moral repertoire
to be drawn on by all and helping me
cope with these awesome sexual,
stunning beauties, traces of sand
to be washed away eventually by waves, not part of the decline of the West
but the end of civilization
and a hubris rearing its head
with its refusal to accept limits,
its sympathy for the abyss,
its rage against order,its awareness
of apocalypse.

And, for me, a substitution of instinct,
impulse and pleasure by those
essentials of restraint in my years,
my life in this post-industrial society1
looked like it was going to take
the whole of my life.

1 Daniel Bell, The Coming Of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Future Forecasting, Basic Books, NY, 1973. The birth of this society took place in the years after WW2, the second Seven Year Plan(1946-1953) just after I was born.

Ron Price
February 28th 2005

[RonPrice]

I had trouble in the above prose-poem with line length: could not change the long lines.-Ron