Single Room Furnished

I got this one in a Drive-in 50-pack. I was excited that Jane Mansfield was a part of this pack and was looking forward to watching Single Room Furnished (1966) because I had never seen it before. To my surprise the film is, well, awful.

Jane Mansfield was fine in this film. I did not have a problem with her acting ability. What I found horrible was this film - not Jane.

Being fair about it - I realize Jane died before she could finish this film and we were left with basically an incomplete film. I know they beefed up the extra characters in order to "complete" the film but the story is just bad. Really bad.

The whole idea behind this story is rubbish to me. Jane plays Johnnie / Mae / Eileen. The woman Johnnie is married, her husband leaves her when she becomes pregnant. That part of the story is OK but what happens next is crazy - Johnnie then changes her hair color and her name to Mae. Mae becomes a waitress, falls in love with a married man who goes back to his wife. Then Mae changes her looks again and her name again this time to Eileen and becomes a prostitute. WHY??? Why would Johnnie keep changing her name and looks just because her husband left her? He's not going to killer her!! He just flat out left her. Do what? What a crazy story that is, quite frankly, boring!!

Charley and Flo are worse... they are the beefed up characters. We hear long boring conversation between them.

OK. If Jane had lived long enough to complete this film then it might have made more sense in the end but I still don't think it would have ever helped this script over all.

Watch this film only if you are really crazy about Jane Mansfield. I'd give this film a 1 but I'm giving it an extra point just for Jane.

2/10

Jayne Mansfield dons three different guises to play one slow-talking, slightly zonked woman (her idea of being sultry is to dawdle over every other word--or maybe she thinks she's being dramatic?). It's a tacky, flashback-framed fiasco that is filled with two-person scenes, and in every sequence the characters keep saying each other's names: "Hey, Flo?" "Yes, Charlie?" "You know what, Flo?" "What, Charlie?" A tired and amateurish farewell to Mansfield, who, contrary to popular belief, was not beheaded before its release. After perishing in an auto crash, a newswire photo flashed across the globe featuring Jayne's blonde wig next to the crushed car's right-front tire. Rumor quickly spread that it was her head, but rest assured Mansfield's head was attached to her body when she died. *1/2 from ****

At the height of her fame, Jayne Mansfield marketed hot water bottles shaped like her notorious 41-18-26 superstructure; sold her used bath water for $10 a shot; reportedly had 1,000,000 lines of copy devoted to her during a six month period in New York alone; and was considered a serious threat to Marilyn Monroe as the world's #1 blonde bombshell. Unfortunately, a relentless drive toward increasingly tacky publicity stunts quickly labeled Mansfield more an event than an actress. By the mid 1960's, her celebrity was renowned, but the star 20th Century Fox once valued at a reported $20 million was adrift without a major studio, appearing in tawdry European film productions and touring in a campy nightclub act. 1966 saw Mansfield hit near-bottom: overweight, alcoholic and dependent on pills, the fading sex goddess was at the nadir of her film career, appearing in worthless dreck like "Las Vegas Hillbillies.": Her current husband, Matt Cimber, however, still fed into her belief that, with the right project, she could become a serious actress. To that end, he directed her first "serious" drama since 1957's "Wayward Bus," a gritty little script called "Single Room, Furnished." In keeping with the film's seedy urban setting, the sets are tacky and threadbare, with a blaring jazz soundtrack. Jayne plays three roles: a teenage bride, a pregnant cocktail waitress, and a call girl. (As one columnist sniffed about the then-unmade film, "Should get into real ART when Jayne plays the teenager!") To Cimber's credit, he elicted a performance from Mansfield which, if not exactly good, is hypnotic and eminently watchable. In most of her films, Mansfield is over-upholstered window dressing; here, she is not given much room to be attractive, and even as the call girl, she's a far cry from her halcyon days at Fox. Therefore, it's to her credit that, without the benefit of silver lame, wriggling undulations or bare-breasted antics, she maintains our interest. It's a hauntingly poetic performance, completely guileless and technically lacking, but somehow very honest. At this point in her life, perhaps Mansfield knew something of her character's sadness and loneliness. On June 29, 1967, Mansfield was killed in a car accident; "Single Room, Furnished" was still incomplete, so additional scenes were shot with the supporting cast. Surprisingly, these scenes are remarkably touching, focusing on the romance between "Flo" and "Charlie." This isn't a good film, by any stretch of the imagination, but it is rather moving, and a sad, quiet postscript to the otherwise gaudy phenomenon of Jayne Mansfield.

The answer is yes. The question: Could Jayne act? She did in this one, and was surprisingly good at it too. I saw this movie more out of morbid curiosity than anything else, not really expecting much. I'd read lots of reviews of it, most of them on the negative side. I admit to being a big Mansfield fan so I did have a bit of a bias. And surprise, surprise I did enjoy it. For the most part! I liked her a lot more than the movie tho. I can understand why this wouldn't have been a box-office hit. It's a bit slow at times, and strays off course. The secondary plot involving Charley and Flo confused me. While the actors did a fine job, after a few minutes I felt like I was watching another movie altogether. Their first scene together was WAY too long, and I began to wonder who they were and why were they there in the first place. But after reading that Jayne died before the film completed it made sense. The producers didn't have enough completed film at that point, so it made sense to beef up the secondary roles the characters play, and pad the length of the film to a reasonable length. Not that the actors were bad, they weren't, but I felt that they were out of place here, and that they should have had a whole film of their own. Jayne does a good job here, though admittedly she's no Bette Davis. She was compelling enough to carry the movie. For a while I actually forgot I was watching Jayne Mansfield, and got caught up in the characters she was playing. She was talented. She could act. And while this isn't a great movie it does show a really good actress in the making. It's tempting to speculate where her career might have led if she'd lived. All in all, this is a good if not great movie. You be the judge.

NYC apartment super Pop tells rebellious girl Maria about the dangers the city presents to young women. Johnie (Jayne Mansfield) and her husband Frankie used to live in the apartment but they grow apart. She gets pregnant and he leaves her. She has a miscarriage and changes her name to Mae. There is another couple Flo and Charley. Charley took pity on Mae who's pregnant again and proposed to her. He changes his mind and married Flo instead. Mae puts the baby for adoption, changes her name to Eileen and becomes a prostitute.

Jayne Mansfield tries to do some dramatic acting. This is notable for her death before she finished filming. Her acting is functional. She won't get any awards but she's not the problem with this movie. The directions are horrendous. Director Matt Cimber does little more than point the camera at a stage play. The settings are amateurish. His eye for visuals is lacking. The editing style is boring. Much of the problem is the disjointed nature of the movie. Some of that disconnected feel may be due to Mansfield's death. However it's not covered well at all. The dialog is clunky. It is slow. This is a bad movie.