This posthumously released final vehicle for Mansfield comes with an introduction by Walter Winchell, who claims it proves Jayne really was capable of the serious dramatic acting she'd always wanted to do. Nice of him to say, but unfortunately the film contradicts him from the get-go.
She plays a poor Bronx innocent just out of school (something that at an increasingly heavy-set 34 years, wearing ridiculous fake platinum tresses down to her waist, Mansfield looked pretty silly trying to convey) whose young husband (Martin Horsey, just awful) leaves her for the romantic freedom of the Navy (?!). She then slips down a long tragic ladder to prostitution. Presumably because Mansfield died before filming was completed, the movie was padded out with tedious scenes about the tentative romance between "Marty"-like plain, middle-aged "little people" Charley (Fabian Dean) and Flo (Dorothy Keller).
Admittedly, nobody has much of a shot at acting well here, since the script is derived from a play by Gerald Sanford—and it absolutely stinks of the kind of mouldy Off-Off- Broadway oldie in which condescending sympathy toward the quaint urban working class, heavy-handed pathos and labored stabs at "poetry" (talking about the moon and the stars, of course). Plays like this were/are the bastard children of good if dated ones by Clifford Odets, William Inge and so forth. They often attract actors of middle-class suburban background who think them so "real" (because said actors have no idea what the urban or rural poor are actually like), and because they invariably offer opportunities for showy histrionics.
This was an odd first feature project for Matt Cimber (beyond the fact that he was Jayne Mansfield's last husband—albeit already her ex-husband when they filmed this), whose erratic later career encompassed sexploitation, blaxploitation, an unusual giallo ("The Witch Who Came from the Sea"), and two Pia Zadora vehicles. It's much stagier than his later efforts, but that's doubtlessly because the script is all very theatrical yada-yada.
Mansfield does try to differentiate her heroine's different personas as she adopts different names and hairstyles in an attempt to restart her life: Naïve young Johnny, abandoned pregnant brunette Mae, then as slutty Eileen. But she seems to think changing wigs means she's acting a new character, as opposed to one going through painful changes. She's finally at home playing cartoon sexpot Eileen—exactly the same type she'd essayed from "The Girl Can't Help It" though "Guide for the Married Man." When that section turns serious, she benefits from "Eileen's" mostly playing listener to the monologue of unstable younger Billy lover (Walter Gregg, who grapples heroically with so much bad dialogue). But when it turns into her monologue, Jayne is just as overworked and unbelievable as the script. Finally, the film makes both of them ridiculous, though it means to make them tragic.
Earnestness does count for something, so in the end it's impossible to detest "SRF." It tries so hard, as do its actors. But there isn't a moment that isn't stilted and/or phony.
She plays a poor Bronx innocent just out of school (something that at an increasingly heavy-set 34 years, wearing ridiculous fake platinum tresses down to her waist, Mansfield looked pretty silly trying to convey) whose young husband (Martin Horsey, just awful) leaves her for the romantic freedom of the Navy (?!). She then slips down a long tragic ladder to prostitution. Presumably because Mansfield died before filming was completed, the movie was padded out with tedious scenes about the tentative romance between "Marty"-like plain, middle-aged "little people" Charley (Fabian Dean) and Flo (Dorothy Keller).
Admittedly, nobody has much of a shot at acting well here, since the script is derived from a play by Gerald Sanford—and it absolutely stinks of the kind of mouldy Off-Off- Broadway oldie in which condescending sympathy toward the quaint urban working class, heavy-handed pathos and labored stabs at "poetry" (talking about the moon and the stars, of course). Plays like this were/are the bastard children of good if dated ones by Clifford Odets, William Inge and so forth. They often attract actors of middle-class suburban background who think them so "real" (because said actors have no idea what the urban or rural poor are actually like), and because they invariably offer opportunities for showy histrionics.
This was an odd first feature project for Matt Cimber (beyond the fact that he was Jayne Mansfield's last husband—albeit already her ex-husband when they filmed this), whose erratic later career encompassed sexploitation, blaxploitation, an unusual giallo ("The Witch Who Came from the Sea"), and two Pia Zadora vehicles. It's much stagier than his later efforts, but that's doubtlessly because the script is all very theatrical yada-yada.
Mansfield does try to differentiate her heroine's different personas as she adopts different names and hairstyles in an attempt to restart her life: Naïve young Johnny, abandoned pregnant brunette Mae, then as slutty Eileen. But she seems to think changing wigs means she's acting a new character, as opposed to one going through painful changes. She's finally at home playing cartoon sexpot Eileen—exactly the same type she'd essayed from "The Girl Can't Help It" though "Guide for the Married Man." When that section turns serious, she benefits from "Eileen's" mostly playing listener to the monologue of unstable younger Billy lover (Walter Gregg, who grapples heroically with so much bad dialogue). But when it turns into her monologue, Jayne is just as overworked and unbelievable as the script. Finally, the film makes both of them ridiculous, though it means to make them tragic.
Earnestness does count for something, so in the end it's impossible to detest "SRF." It tries so hard, as do its actors. But there isn't a moment that isn't stilted and/or phony.