Jayne Mansfield - Cartoon Pneumatic Blonde

Jayne Mansfield was a pneumatic Blonde bombshell whose few substantial film roles tended to use her as a living cartoon. Below Marilyn Monroe and Kim Novak but above Sheree North and Mamie van Doren in the 1950's pinup pecking order, Mansfield was a limited but likable screen performer, lucky enough to feature in one bona fide movie classic, Frank Tashlin's rock'n'roll-packed exercise in visual va-va-voom, 'The Girl Can't Help it' in 1956. Here, she sends up her own celebrity as a gangster's girl promoted as a singing star by press agent Tom Ewell. She wobbles down the street to Little Richard's title song, driving men into Tex Avery Wolf-like frenzies of lust with her mere preence, and gamely poses for a series of juvenile
sight gags (holding a pair of milk bottles to her breasts) that exploit her image as an American sex fantasy.

Mansfield's first film roles were as dumb blonde underworld hangers-on or murder victims ('Illegal' in 1955) but she was relaunched as a comedy star after her Broadway success in 'Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?' which Tashlin filmed in 1957.
Wondeful as Mansfield was in Tashlin's duo, there wasn't much more she could actually do in Hollywood movies. Soon after being uncomfortably pursued by Cary Grant in the archly titled 'Kiss Them for Me' in 1957, she left for Europe, appearing as a striptease queen in'Too Hot to Handle' in 1960, before making 'It Happened in Athens' in 1961 and 'Heimweh nach St. Pauli'
the following year (Homesick for St Pauli).

Back home, she appeared discreetly nude in 'Promises! Promises!' in 1963 and was one of the "Technical Advisors" in 'A Guide for the Married Man' in 1967. Mansfield played a prostitute in the tawdry drama 'Single Room Furnished' in 1968, which wasn't completed until after her tragic death in a car crash.