This movie would be unwatchable if not for Jayne Mansfield making her final screen appearance. Based (painfully obviously) on a stage play, it has characters who seem borrowed from "Marty" and other sources pouring out platitudes on love, loneliness etc. The actors deliver their lines as though each of them were alone on-stage---sorry, on-screen. (One scene takes place on a fishing pier. It could just as well been set in a park, or a cemetery, or the moon for that matter.) Mansfield plays either three characters or one character with three names. The third act---sorry, sequence---is the best, with Mansfield as "Eileen," the bar hostess (amongst other activities). She entertains a convention of toymakers (made me nostalgic for when such items were actually manufactured here, as opposed to China or elsewhere) then struts regally along the city street (I imagined Little Richard popping out from an alley: "The girl still can't help it
.") to her "single room, furnished" to find her twitchy sailor boyfriend (who today would be a "stalker," I guess) waiting for her. The sequence is filmed in mostly long takes with stark lighting, as though the apartment were in outer space with a searchlight finding the actors. Mansfield registers an astounding range of emotions as Eileen takes off her make-up and prepares to retire for the night as the sailor (shriekingly overplayed by an actor whose last film this also apparently was) recounts his life story and rants about them running off to get married. The most striking shot is of Eileen lying on her bed with her face in front of the camera with the sailor's face hovering overhead; her sad street-hardened wistfulness is absolutely on mark as she hints at the sort of "work" she's done in the room. "'Prostitute' is a beautiful word," she murmurs almost dreamily, "compared to 'whore' and the others
." For a moment she gets caught up in the sailor's giddy plans to go live on an island but then when he accidentally breaks a prized doll of hers given by a dead former lover, she turns on him and drives him away. Even as she laughs in his face, her regret is visible just behind her eyes. It's a mature professional performance, filling me with regret that her talent always had to play second fiddle to her, um, natural attributes. It seems especially unfair that she was always "in Marilyn Monroe's shadow." Both were eager to perform well but every line Monroe ever said on-screen sounded like a line reading. Mansfield could convey the impression that her character had an existence beyond the camera's range.
I rented "Room" from Facets along with "Female Jungle," Mansfield's screen debut. The latter is hardly the worst no-budget early-Fifties "noir" I've ever seen, in fact parts of it share the kind of Expressionistic malevolence seen in Fritz Lang's earlier "The Big Heat." (It's one of only a few films directed by stalwart B-movie actor Bruno VeSota who also makes a cameo appearance as one of the toymakers in "Room.") Mansfield is in only a couple of scenes in "Jungle" as the bed-hopping "bimbo" but her vitality and ease on camera are unforgettable. She already comes off as a seasoned pro. There of course have been a lot of American actresses with "sex appeal" but oddly enough, not that many for whom it folds seamlessly into the rest of their personality as opposed to just "fronting." (Want an example? Okay, here's one: Patricia Neal---yeah, that's right, from "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and "Hud." That's one sexy adult woman totally confident in who and what she is. Want a more recent example? Okay---Elizabeth Ashley. Watch her in that elevator scene in "Paternity" where she's just standing and talking ---oh, man. I'm there if called.) Such actresses have a better shot at full flowering in Europe where they prefer women not to be cartoons (unless of course they're goofing on some Yank icon e.g. in "Barbarella.") Mansfield had some European roles but of course back then (to paraphrase a line from "Bladerunner") "If you're not Hollywood, you're little people." Seems a damn shame she didn't live longer or more recently. There are just a lot more avenues of employment available nowadays. Don't even get me started on the position Orson Welles would have as a contemporary filmmaker .
So there it is, my little tribute to an American actress and woman who, in my humble opinion, deserves to be more than just a lingering joke in the cultural lexicon---"Oh yeah, the big boobs---didn't she get decapitated in a car accident?" (Actually the head was not completely severed.) At least she didn't go into a funk and kill herself like Monroe. (Okay, okay, like everyone I can't be "really sure" what happened to Monroe, but only in the impractical sense that one can never be "really sure" about anything.) I find it worth watching "Special Victims Unit" on TV just to see Mansfield's daughter Mariska Hargitay pursuing sexual predators. I like to think that if there's such a thing as "looking down from above" (which I doubt), Jayne is doing that now in approval of the kind of serious, searing part she herself was never considered "qualified" to do ..
I rented "Room" from Facets along with "Female Jungle," Mansfield's screen debut. The latter is hardly the worst no-budget early-Fifties "noir" I've ever seen, in fact parts of it share the kind of Expressionistic malevolence seen in Fritz Lang's earlier "The Big Heat." (It's one of only a few films directed by stalwart B-movie actor Bruno VeSota who also makes a cameo appearance as one of the toymakers in "Room.") Mansfield is in only a couple of scenes in "Jungle" as the bed-hopping "bimbo" but her vitality and ease on camera are unforgettable. She already comes off as a seasoned pro. There of course have been a lot of American actresses with "sex appeal" but oddly enough, not that many for whom it folds seamlessly into the rest of their personality as opposed to just "fronting." (Want an example? Okay, here's one: Patricia Neal---yeah, that's right, from "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and "Hud." That's one sexy adult woman totally confident in who and what she is. Want a more recent example? Okay---Elizabeth Ashley. Watch her in that elevator scene in "Paternity" where she's just standing and talking ---oh, man. I'm there if called.) Such actresses have a better shot at full flowering in Europe where they prefer women not to be cartoons (unless of course they're goofing on some Yank icon e.g. in "Barbarella.") Mansfield had some European roles but of course back then (to paraphrase a line from "Bladerunner") "If you're not Hollywood, you're little people." Seems a damn shame she didn't live longer or more recently. There are just a lot more avenues of employment available nowadays. Don't even get me started on the position Orson Welles would have as a contemporary filmmaker .
So there it is, my little tribute to an American actress and woman who, in my humble opinion, deserves to be more than just a lingering joke in the cultural lexicon---"Oh yeah, the big boobs---didn't she get decapitated in a car accident?" (Actually the head was not completely severed.) At least she didn't go into a funk and kill herself like Monroe. (Okay, okay, like everyone I can't be "really sure" what happened to Monroe, but only in the impractical sense that one can never be "really sure" about anything.) I find it worth watching "Special Victims Unit" on TV just to see Mansfield's daughter Mariska Hargitay pursuing sexual predators. I like to think that if there's such a thing as "looking down from above" (which I doubt), Jayne is doing that now in approval of the kind of serious, searing part she herself was never considered "qualified" to do ..