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She certainly can't, and as embodied by the buxom, blindingly blonde Jayne Mansfield, she causes all manner of mayhem: in her generous presence, eyeglasses crack, ice melts, milk ejaculates from its bottle. Curvy in looks but flat in the talent department, Mansfield's the ambitious moll of Edmond O'Brien, the “King of the Jukeboxes,” just out of the pen and determined to make Mansfield a star. This being Tashlin, vulgarity and Vermeer are both on display, and everything is so outsized and garish - in Fauvist DeLuxe colour and screen-stretching CinemaScope - that one sometimes wonders if THE GIRL CAN'T HELP IT is not satire but some crazed kind of Fifties ethnographic documentary. Bolt yourself to a Jackman Hall chair during the big musical numbers or you'll be tempted to shimmy in the aisles as Gene Vincent, The Platters, Fats Domino, and Little Richard let rip. GIRL's long been a cult classic among aficionados, whose ranks include Wim Wenders (“my definitive Guilty Pleasure!” ) and François Truffaut, who called it “more than a good film, more than a funny film, more than an excellent parody; it is a kind of masterpiece of the genre. . . . It's more beautiful and more successful each time you see it.” PG
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