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5 the direCtor and the BomBshell tashlin and JaYne mansfield ...................................................................... ritics, scholars, and Tashlin himself generally agree that The Girl Can’t Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? are the director’s two best films.1 It is a claim that this volume will not refute. The starring performances by Jayne Mansfield in both of these films are crucial to their success. Mansfield was, in many ways, Tashlin’s least skilled leading performer, and yet he uses her as the locus of some of his best performance-based comedy. Though more talented than her reputation suggests, Mansfield was nowhere near as gifted a performer as Bob Hope or Jerry Lewis, and her persona was not half as complex or well-formed. As this chapter argues, one of the reasons that Mansfield’s comedy in these films is so successful is that Tashlin effectively uses her a channel for his other interests—satire, sexual humor, visual gags. Moreover, Tashlin employs Mansfield —and, crucially, her straight-man costars, Tom Ewell and Tony Randall—in ways that allow him to unify the manyelements that comprise his style. In Mansfield,Tashlin ’s style had found its perfect vehicle. The Girl Who Couldn’t Help It Like Porky Pig, Jayne Mansfield was something of a blank slate. While she certainly didn’t lack a star persona, it was fairly uncomplicated, and, like Porky Pig’s in the 1930s, it was malleable. When she first collaborated with Tashlin in The Girl Can’t Help It, her persona was partially established, but her performance style was virtually nonexistent . It was in the two films she made with Tashlin, in fact, that these elements were fixed. Mansfield gave for Tashlin not just her two finest performances, but her career-making performances. Unlike Hope and Lewis, Mansfield was not a trained C 120 : t a s h l i n e s q u e comedian. It is an unfortunate reality of the studio system that, while Hope’s and Lewis’s first film roles came about as a result of their success in other realms of entertainment, Mansfield was first cast on the basis of her appearance. A former beauty queen, Mansfield moved to Hollywood in 1954, intent on becoming a star. After attracting attention with a stunt involving a swimming pool and an ill-secured bikini top, Mansfield was signed to a Warner Bros. contract.2 She and her agent, Jim Byron, developed a promotional strategy built around not only her physical assets, but her willingness to mock them. Byron has said, “She was the satire of all dumb blondes. . . . One time Jayne arrived and I posed her by a sign on a crane which was there. The sign said, ‘Excess Frontage Overhang.’ It wasn’t a problem coming up with individual stunts for her.”3 This good-natured self-mockery is the very thing that distinguishes Mansfield from the more overtly glamorous bombshells of the time, most notably Marilyn Monroe. Tashlin did not invent this facet of her persona, but he did a great deal to develop it. After taking supporting parts in three Warner Bros. productions of 1955—Pete Kelly’s Blues, Illegal, and Hell on Frisco Bay—Mansfield was offered a lead role in the Broadway production of George Axelrod’s play Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? In the play, which resembles the film only titularly, Mansfield played a ditzy starlet, “more or less based on the studio-stupid image of Marilyn Monroe. Jayne opened the show clad barely in a towel, lying on a massage table.”4 The play was a success, and Twentieth Century-Fox bought the film rights and signed the star to a contract. Mansfield’s first picture as a Fox player was not Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? but The Girl Can’t Help It, in which the bombshell facet of her persona was cemented. Fox then took the cautious next step of off-casting Mansfield, starring her in an adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel The Wayward Bus (1957). However, the studio apparently found Mansfield’s dimwitted bombshell persona to be the more bankable one: inWill Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Mansfield’s next film for Fox, the oversexed , clueless, lovable diva Rita Marlowe is the embodiment of the two principal components of Mansfield’s screen persona: her overripe sexuality , and her ability to satirize same. Unfortunately, comprehensive box-office figures for the films are unavailable, and a scan of Variety’s reports for their respective first...

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