THE GIRL CAN’T HELP IT
T. it.: “Gangster cerca moglie”; Scen.: Frank Tashlin, Herbert Baker, dall’omonimo racconto di Garson Kanin; F.: Leon Shamroy; M.: James B. Clark; Scgf.: Walter M. Scott, Paul S. Fox; Superv. mu.: Lionel Newman; Int.: Tom Ewell (Tom Miller), Jayne Mansfield (Jerri Jordan), Edmond O’Brien (Murdock), Henry Jones (Mousie), John Emery (Wheeler), Juanita Moore (Hilda), Julie London, Ray Anthony, Barry Gordon, Fats Domino, The Platters, Little Richard Band, Gene Vincent Blue Caps, The Treniers, Eddie Fontaine, The Chuckles, Abbey Lincoln, Johnny Olenn, Nino Tempo, Eddie Cochran; Prod.: Frank Tashlin per 20th Century Fox; 35mm. D.: 99’.
Film Notes
In his enthusiastic writings of that time, Godard stated that: “Frank Tashlin has done much more than renew the American comedy, he has invented a new form. From now on, when people talk about American films, they won’t have to say ‘that’s like Chaplin-style’, instead they must instead say loud and clear, ‘that’s like Tashlin’”. […] The next step for Tashlin, after comics and cartoons, was to give a body through his films to images from advertising and television. Tashlin makes cinematic use of comic strip forms, visualizing their effect. However, those forms are only part of the mass media reality that he transforms in his films and represents as bright, multi-colored, and in CinemaScope: cinematic images unfurl, unrelenting in their march towards advertising, stars that become models, bodily shapes and gestures within which the sensuality of rock‘n’ roll pulses, and realities that bear the mark of television trash.
Frieda Grafe, in Luce negli occhi colori nella mente. Scritti di cinema 1961-2000, Mariann Lewinsky and Enno Patalas eds., Cineteca di Bologna/Le Mani, Bologna/Recco, 2002