Saturdays with the Stars Season 2 Finale

Two of our legendary Stars of 2020,
Sophia Loren & Jayne Mansfield

Yesterday with The Three Musketeers we hit the finale of our second season of "Saturdays with the Stars," and before we start the new year (and a new season, devoted to Hitchcock's leading ladies), I wanted to take time to celebrate another season, and one I treat as a success.  We never missed a Saturday (there was one close call, but that was really it-being stuck at home made at least this part of 2020 easier), and I saw a lot of new movies & now have a better understanding of twelve stars, some of which I knew next to nothing about before this year.  And I hope you learned something as well!

It's always fascinating to me to focus on an actor's career, rather than as we typically do in film discussions on a director's.  Watching these women, particularly under the guise of "Sex Symbols" was intriguing to me because Hollywood had different attitudes toward these beautiful women as the public began to find their sexuality passé, or eventually, absent.  It is kind of heartbreaking to watch someone like a Jayne Mansfield or Raquel Welch, who clearly chose poorly at select moments of their careers & paid the price for it, and fascinating to watch a figure like Sophia Loren or Ann-Margret who was able to rise above their studio-forced persona and eventually gain mainstream critical recognition in their lifetimes.

Every film I watched this year was a movie I was seeing for the very first time, as well, so once again I was blown away by the expanses of Classic Hollywood, rich with westerns and noir and musicals that I'd never been exposed to.  Next year we'll do our third and final tour of Classic Hollywood actresses (after that, if we continue the series, we're going to either add men or a more modern element for a fourth season), so we'll continue to mine this well, but before we do that, let's hand out some superlatives for this year's leading ladies.

Favorite Performance from Each Star

January: Jean Harlow-Red Dust

February: Betty Grable-I Wake Up Screaming

March: Lena Horne-Cabin in the Sky

April: Rita Hayworth-Separate Tables

May: Lana Turner-The Postman Always Rings Twice

June: Marilyn Monroe-The Misfits

July: Jayne Mansfield-Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?

August: Sophia Loren-Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

September: Gina Lollobrigida-Come September

October: Nancy Kwan-The World of Suzie Wong

November: Ann-Margret-Carnal Knowledge

December: Raquel Welch-The Three Musketeers

5 Favorite Actresses of the Year (Alphabetical)

Jean Harlow

Rita Hayworth

Sophia Loren

Marilyn Monroe

Lana Turner

5 Favorite Performances of the Year (Alphabetical)

Rita Hayworth, Separate Tables

Sophia Loren, Two Women

Sophia Loren, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Marilyn Monroe, The Misfits

Lana Turner, The Postman Always Rings Twice

10 Favorite Films of the Year (Alphabetical)

Cabin in the Sky

Cover Girl

I Wake Up Screaming

Imitation of Life

Libeled Lady

The Misfits

The Postman Always Rings Twice

Red Dust

Separate Tables

Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Top 10 Performances of the Year (Not By Our Leading Ladies)

Clark Gable, The Misfits

David Niven, Separate Tables

Eli Wallach, The Misfits

Ethel Waters, Cabin in the Sky

Eve Arden, Cover Girl

Jennifer Jones, Beat the Devil

Juanita Moore, Imitation of Life

Laird Cregar, I Wake Up Screaming

Susan Kohner, Imitation of Life

Thelma Ritter, The Misfits

The Las Vegas Hillbillys (1966)

Film: The Las Vegas Hillbillys (1966)
Stars: Ferlin Husky, Jayne Mansfield, Mamie van Doren, Don Bowman, Billie Bird
Director: Arthur C. Pierce
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Jayne Mansfield-click here to learn more about Ms. Mansfield (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We are going to end our look at the career of Jayne Mansfield in a place that she'd probably prefer we forget.  As we mentioned last week, Mansfield's turn in Promises! Promises! gave the actress something rare in Hollywood: a second chance.  She'd had a big hit, and after years of being "passé," offers were starting to come in.  Mansfield was even given a role once intended for Marilyn Monroe, the lead in Billy Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid, but once again Mansfield was pregnant (this time with future Law & Order star Mariska Hargitay), once again the part went to Kim Novak, and once again it was a big hit, the kind that might have cemented Mansfield's comeback, but instead, Jayne quickly was relegated back to Grade Z pictures, which led to today's film The Las Vegas Hillbillys, most noted today for being the only onscreen meeting of two of the "Three M's," as the picture features both Mansfield and her off-screen nemesis Mamie van Doren.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Woody (Husky), a bumpkin who inherits his uncle's Las Vegas bar, as well as the beautiful woman who sings at it Boots Malone (van Doren), who is under contract to sing at the establishment.  While driving there with his buddy Jeepers (Bowman), they come across another beautiful blonde Tawny (Mansfield), who is a big headliner in Vegas, and gives them some breaks throughout the film, as they are at risk of losing the bar.  In the end, Tawny and Woody's aunt (Bird) save the bar from going down by recruiting a bunch of big-name country singers (vocalists like Connie Smith, Bill Anderson, and Roy Drusky play themselves throughout the movie's many extended country songs), to perform, and the money & crowds get them enough money to pay off the creditors.  Oh, and Boots & Woody end up together because, well, why not (this is really out of the blue in the film)?

The movie is really bad, and not quite in a campy enough way, though there are times it comes close.  Probably the best pop culture reference here is not The Beverly Hillbillies (though that was clearly who they were trying to piggyback on with the title), but Hee Haw, which wouldn't come out for a few years after the film came out.  The best performance in the film comes from van Doren, who can sing (even if she's a bit more rock-and-roll than country), and seems to get that this is a paycheck, but at least you get to be in a movie.  Mansfield's part is pretty slim-she's in maybe three scenes in the movie despite her high billing, and she's in the background of one of them.  It's also not clear exactly what the point of her character is-she plays her like a vamp who is smitten with Woody, but she never makes a move on Woody or tries to double-cross him.  The movie is, well, low stakes in that regard.

Mansfield refused to appear onscreen with van Doren.  The actresses only have one scene together, but they were filmed apart, and it shows.  Thus, this kind of ruins the camp factor of the picture-any modern film fan would be watching to see what it's like when these two actresses face off, and deprived of that, this isn't worth the time.  It is, however, a good portrait of what might have happened with Mansfield's career since both she & van Doren were in the same place professionally at this point.  Van Doren has said in interviews that after Marilyn's death, the public didn't want to look at women who looked like Monroe, as it made them sad, and so it was harder to get work.  She did, however, continue making these kinds of campy films for the rest of the 1960's, before becoming a successful nightclub performer & regular USO Tour performer during Vietnam, writing a celebrated memoir (she's supposedly working on a followup), getting a star on the Walk of Fame, becoming a Pulp Fiction punchline, and posing for a famed photo with a future generation's sex symbol.  All-in-all, while Las Vegas Hillbillys wasn't a high point in her career, Mamie van Doren, now age 89, has had a full and solidly successful life.

Jayne Mansfield, of course, did not achieve that.  She never had another leading role during her lifetime, and would die just over a year after the film's release.  Mansfield, unlike Marilyn, doesn't have a lot of mystery surrounding her demise, but it was just as brutal & sudden.  She died on June 29th, 1967, after the car she was driving in ran into a tractor-trailer outside of New Orleans, and died instantly, her skull crushing upon impact (she was not, as stated in urban legend, decapitated).  As a result, the 34-year-old actress who spent her entire career trying to be Marilyn Monroe, ended up mirroring her in the most horrific way imaginable.  Next month, we will move on to one last blonde sex symbol of the 1950's whose career would last well past Marilyn & Jayne's, sometimes to great success, and more often, infamy.

Promises! Promises! (1963)

Film: Promises! Promises! (1963)
Stars: Jayne Mansfield, Marie McDonald, Tommy Noonan, Mickey Hargitay, TC Jones
Director: King Donovan
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Jayne Mansfield-click here to learn more about Ms. Mansfield (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As we mentioned in our first article about Jayne Mansfield, her career at its peak did not last long.  In fact, of all of the actresses we'll profile this year, hers was the shortest, coming in roughly around the same time as Jean Harlow's time in the spotlight (though Harlow's of course ended because she died so young).  Mansfield by the early 1960's was already passé, despite having just had her big break in The Girl's Gotta Have It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?.  It wasn't necessarily that Hollywood had never wanted to back her-Rock Hunter was a proper success, and she won a best newcomer Golden Globe (she tied for that award with actresses Natalie Wood and Carroll Baker, both of whom would have more serious success & much more established career after their win).  But by the early 1960's, Mansfield was a joke.  People were kind of over the physicality of the big-breasted, hyper-blonde bombshells (even Marilyn Monroe's films were starting to struggle, though not to the degree of her copycats), and the public thought that Mansfield's constant quest for publicity was gauche.  She lost out on Bell, Book, and Candle (which could have completely changed the trajectory of her career) to Kim Novak after becoming pregnant, and so Fox lost interest in her, pushing her into foreign productions with little chance of a comeback, and so Mansfield maintained her celebrity through the nightclub circuit.  All of this is to say, by the time that Promises! Promises! came around, the whiff of scandal might have smelled more like opportunity to Mansfield, thirty and already seeing the best parts of her career in the rearview mirror.

(Spoilers Ahead) Promises! Promises! is what used to be called a sex comedy.  About the most common modern equivalent would be some of the films of Judd Apatow-a movie that gets most of its plot and punchlines from sex, frequently trying to either wink at the audience through coyness or make them squirm through familiarity.  Here, the film is about Sandy (Mansfield), who is on a cruise with her husband Jeff (Noonan) and their couple friends Claire (McDonald) & King (Hargitay).  Sandy is desperate to become pregnant, but her husband seems unable to make her so.  A doctor gives him a pill, that, because of taboos at the time, we don't entirely know what it does, but essentially it seems like it's Viagra with a side effect of amnesia; we're given to believe that Jeff is having mind-blowing sex with Sandy on this pill, and as a result, might get her pregnant (science takes a bit of a hit in this movie).  The problem is it isn't working, but Jeff can't bear to tell Sandy that, so he lies to her that she's pregnant.  About halfway through the movie, the two couples, hopped up on the pills (without their knowledge), couple swap, and only Jeff realizes it.  This causes Sandy to become pregnant, or so we are to believe, which Jeff thinks is the result of a night with King, but in the end it's not that King got Sandy pregnant (we find out that King is unable to have children), but that Jeff is the father of both children, a secret he & Claire keep as the couples happily reunite in the end.

The movie is probably meant to be worse than it is.  Low-budget, it was produced on Noonan's dime. To modern audiences, Noonan is most famous for his roles in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the Judy Garland version of A Star is Born, but in the early 1960's he tried his hand at producing his own movies, making both this and a similarly-themed 3 Nuts In Search of a Bolt with Mamie van Doren.  This movie is arguably the same problem over-and-over, and lord is it bad if you get into the sexual politics of it, not just in terms of gender but homosexuality; there's a gay hairdresser played by female impersonator TC Jones, and in arguably the funniest scene in the movie, Jones impersonates Tallulah Bankhead, Bette Davis, and, yes, Jayne Mansfield (because it wouldn't be a Mansfield film without a self-reference) to an adoring crowd.  It's not awful-this is fun enough to watch-but it's not good, and it's certainly not as freshly silly as Rock Hunter.

But the main thing that anyone remembers about this film is the nudity.  Jayne Mansfield became the first major American actress to appear nude in a motion picture since the Hays Code, and the first time a star of any note had appeared nude onscreen since arguably Hedy Lamarr in Ecstasy (prior to her days in Hollywood).  Mansfield's nudity is not subtle-modern-day audiences might be surprised by how brazen the sex scenes are (I know I was), with Mansfield appearing fully topless at a doorway, and then eventually writhing around on a bed (a scene that is referenced in dream sequences multiple times later).  It's certainly the most shocking thing in the film, not only because you don't expect a movie of this nature to have nudity (clearly-it was a first), but also because you're reminded how much nudity has disappeared from modern-day films.  The bet that she made by being first (though, as is the case with most of Mansfield's career, she almost wasn't-Marilyn Monroe was slated to be nude in Something's Got to Give before her death, with Mansfield once again taking Monroe's recycled ideas) paid off.  Promises! Promises! was a hit, enough to spawn 3 Nuts, and gave Mansfield her last big opportunity to regain her stardom.  Next week we'll see how that turns out as we conclude our July tribute to Jayne Mansfield.

The Burglar (1957)

Film: The Burglar (1957)
Stars: Dan Duryea, Jayne Mansfield, Martha Vickers, Peter Capell, Mickey Shaughnessy
Director: Paul Wendkos
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Jayne Mansfield-click here to learn more about Ms. Mansfield (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

It is impossible to have a conversation about Jayne Mansfield without bringing up Marilyn Monroe.  Mansfield came about almost completely as a result of Monroe, and in almost every way was a facsimile of her.  It feels unkind to call her a "poor man's Mariliyn," but history has basically given us that title so it seems foolhardy to ignore.  That being said, one of the main reasons that history has forgotten Mansfield is that she didn't have Monroe's savvy (or luck) to be able to headline for great directors.  Monroe is more remembered today for her birthday songs and impossibly sexualized appearance, but she also left behind a filmography worth revisiting, making pictures for John Huston, Joe Mankiewicz, Howard Hawks, George Cukor, & Billy Wilder, among others.  Mansfield only really worked with two directors that are remembered at all today (Stanley Donen & Raoul Walsh) on very minor movies in their filmographies, and as a result has few films that seem at all interested in her doing anything other than breathlessly turning on the audience.  A rare exception to this was 1957's The Burglar, a largely forgotten late-era film noir where she plays the adopted sister of jewel thief Dan Duryea.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film centers around Nat Harbin (Duryea) a low-level jewel thief who attempts a shot at the big time by stealing the emerald necklace of a phony spiritualist, who has just conned a dying millionaire into giving her his fortune.  Nat successfully steals the jewelry after Gladden (Mansfield), a girl that he has raised since childhood when he was adopted by his father, cases the joint.  After a successful robbery, the two along with their associates Baylock (Capell) and Dohmer (Shaughnessy) struggle to find a solution on how to unload the necklace, as it's too hot to sell for what it's worth.  Eventually Dohmer attempts to rape Gladden, so obsessed is he by his lust, and she is sent off to a beach resort where she is seduced by a crooked cop who is trying to get the necklace for himself.  Nat is also being seduced by a mysterious woman named Della (Vickers) who turns out to be the accomplice of the cop.  One-by-one all of the jewel thieves die, eventually even Nat at the cop's hands, only to have the cop outed in a shootout at a carnival, with a weeping Gladden hunched over his body.

The Burglar is a conundrum for me, and for anyone who has seen a lot of film noir.  It's not bad-you don't put Dan Duryea & Martha Vickers in the leads of a noir and end up with a bad movie-but it's all been done before.  The opening scene of a newsreel is mirroring Citizen Kane, while the carnival funhouse scenes have been done better in The Lady from Shanghai, or later Woman on the Run with Ann Sheridan.  Essentially, Paul Wendkos is trying to mirror Orson Welles, but he manages to only do it by being a copycat, rather than having something new to say.  Welles himself would prove the following year that despite nearly two decades of formula ahead of him, he would have a fresh take on the genre with Touch of Evil, but The Burglar is merely good while attempting to be great.

The performances are probably what save it.  Duryea as Nat is terrific, the longtime character actor getting full chance at the lead and he takes advantage of it.  There are some very artsy, angsty shots that feel more at-home in a 1960's film than 1957, and Duryea's everyman plays into that well.  Vickers, who a decade earlier had made her mark in the classic The Big Sleep, is given a thankless role but finds some fun dimensions to it, and at least the pickup scene where she basically tricks Nat into coming onto her is fun.  Mansfield, though?  She's...fine.  It seems mean to say because she's not ardently bad, but compared to accomplished performers like Duryea and Vickers, it looks like she's phoning this performance in, and doesn't have the dramatic heft to get into the head of Gladden in the way, say, Kim Novak would have done with the part.  There is a weird incestuous vibe between Gladden & Nat (she's desperately in love with him, despite the fact that he views himself as her father or brother), but Mansfield can't even nab the strangeness of such a character quirk, and is out-of-her-depths here.  She's good because the part is good, not because she's giving some great dramatic work.

Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957)

Film: Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957)
Stars: Jayne Mansfield, Tony Randall, Betsy Drake, Joan Blondell
Director: Frank Tashlin
Oscar History: No nominations, though Randall was nominated for a Golden Globe.
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Jayne Mansfield-click here to learn more about Ms. Mansfield (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As we start our month with Jayne Mansfield, I'm going to do something I don't normally do in "Saturdays with the Stars," and certainly have not done yet this year.  We are going to go slightly out of chronological order with her films (we'll go with a different film from earlier in 1957 next week).  This is both because we aren't (for reasons you'll see when you catch the four films that I picked for Mansfield) going to watch her cinematic big break, The Girl Can't Help It (for which she won a Golden Globe), and because Jayne Mansfield's time in the spotlight was incredibly short.  More than pretty much any other actress we've profiled (even Ruth Roman last year), Mansfield really was only a star for a couple of years, in many ways not equalling the stars of her era, but more in-line with sex symbols of the 1970's & 80's like Bo Derek & Kelly LeBrock, who only lit up for a year or two before receding.  This was in part because by the time Mansfield had come around, it was obvious who the next big "sex symbol star" after Marilyn would be, and it wouldn't be a busty blonde-it would be a brunette, one whose career in movies preceded Monroe's: Elizabeth Taylor.  Mansfield's best chance at sustained stardom, and what made it seem like she might be able to equal Marilyn was the film we're discussing today, which launched her career on Broadway, and then became a smash hit: Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film isn't necessarily centered on Mansfield's Rita Marlowe despite her billing, but instead on Tony Randall's Rock Hunter.  Rock is a normal guy, working as an average Joe at an advertising firm, where he's certain he'll soon marry his secretary Jenny (Drake) and start a family.  When he finds out he is about to lose his contract with a makeup company, Rock panics, and decides to make a pitch to film star Rita Marlowe, known as the "girl with the kissable lips."  Marlowe is trying to make her ex-boyfriend, the bodybuilding Bobo (played by Mickey Hargitay, who would soon be Mansfield's husband), jealous, and so she pretends to have a relationship with Rock, whose world is suddenly turned upside-down by fame and success (he gets promoted, as one does when they date the most famous woman in the world).  The film ends with Rock & Jenny reuniting, and setting up Rita with her long lost love, George Schmidlap (Groucho Marx in an awesome cameo).

The film is famous for its skewering of advertising, and in particular television.  There is an extended opening with Randall mocking the TV industry through a series of jabs, and another that happens midway into the movie(so that audiences won't be disturbed by not having a "commercial").  Combined with the many lampoons that Mansfield gets in (both an obvious Marilyn Monroe impression, and within the movie, she also gets a number of references to other Jayne Mansfield pictures), the movie's quite funny.  Joan Blondell is a riot as Mansfield's assistant, and while occasionally it strains credulity, it's a solid script and there's a lot of humor in it.  It's kind of stupid humor, but I liked it-not everything has to be Shakespeare, and this is delicious cotton candy.

Mansfield's also very good in the central role.  We're going to get to Mansfield in a couple of different  types of the same role, but this one is her best version.  That's because the actress that Mansfield is playing is the sort of "smart blonde" prototype that Mansfield (who was a child prodigy, and had a supposedly genius IQ) could sell with aplomb.  Mansfield's Rita is supposed to parody Marilyn, but it more parodies Marilyn's public persona-a woman who knows how to manipulate the press & every man in her path-rather than the private Marilyn, or even the private Jayne (a much more traditional woman who would soon be married with a number of children).  This works-Rita is clever, steals every scene she's in, and makes the movie her own.  Mansfield's stardom may have fallen fast, but she came by it honestly.

Saturdays with the Stars: Jayne Mansfield

Each month of 2020 we will be looking at the careers of some of Hollywood's most famous sex symbols, women whose intense beauty frequently overshadowed their filmic careers.  Last month, our focus was on Marilyn Monroe, the personification of a "sex symbol first, actress second" career, whose iconic look is still synonymous with the movies decades later.  This month, we will investigate the work of a woman whose career wouldn't have been possible without Monroe's, someone who came about as a response to the former Norma Jean's rampant success, but who never achieved the triumphs of Monroe's career, and only truly matched Monroe's fame by having an equally tragic death.  This month, we take a look at the career of Jayne Mansfield.

It would be entirely possible (but probably a bit repetitive) in a series about sex symbols in classic Hollywood to simply focus all 2020 on Marilyn and those actresses who were hired in the years following her fame to be the "next Marilyn."  There's a famous scene in Pulp Fiction where John Travolta talks about how two seemingly identical actresses dressed in blonde wigs and push-up bras are impersonating totally different actresses, with one being a Marilyn impersonator and another impersonating Mamie van Doren (with a comment about how "Jayne Mansfield must have the night off").  Mansfield and Van Doren are the two most well-known "Marilyn successors," (collectively they were known as "The Three M's") but they were hardly the only ones.  A dozen or so similarly built-and-coiffed women all had varying degrees of success in the years following Monroe's trailblazing at Fox as blonde, buxom women who got the leftover parts that would have gone to Monroe had she not been too famous for them.  Some, like Kim Novak, became so famous as an established star herself that few people think of her as a woman hired at one point to be "the next Marilyn" (Novak isn't going to be a part of this series because I've seen almost all of her most famous films and I wanted to expand my opinion of some of these stars, though she'd obviously fit and I'm hoping to include her in a future season).  Others like Diana Dors & Sheree North quickly rose-and-fell, their names entirely forgotten to even serious film historians.

Since I only had one slot to fill with a "Marilyn knockoff" for the series, I boiled it down to Mansfield and van Doren, but Mansfield's infamous death seemed to fit the mold of a screen star stuck forever in their youth & beauty (the growing theme of this year's series) better than her onetime rival at Universal.  Van Doren, now nearly 90 years old, was able to have a full life that Monroe & Mansfield were never afforded, living long enough to see her career become camp, and profiting off of it, eventually becoming one of the last living stars of the 1950's & getting her own pictorial in her 70's opposite a future generation's sex symbol: Pamela Anderson.  Jayne Mansfield's life took a different turn.

Born Vera Jane Palmer, the future Jayne Mansfield was not an overnight success, even with Marilyn proving there was an obvious appetite for curvaceous blondes (early in her career, Mansfield, a natural brunette, dyed her hair as a result of feedback from a screen test).  She struggled to find stardom, getting turned down by both Paramount and Warner Bros, and didn't really come into the public consciousness until her time as a Playboy centerfold, which in that era was a good way to gain fame (Monroe had done it, albeit against her will, as had household names like Bettie Page and Anita Ekberg).  She worked briefly for Warner in bit parts before finally signing a contract to Fox, less in an effort to mold Mansfield into a star than to try and tamp down Monroe's diva behavior at the studio by proving there were more gorgeous blondes in the sea.

Mansfield's stardom was brief.  She had a huge hit with The Girl Can't Help It (for which she won a Golden Globe), a 1956 movie that had multiple appearances by rock-and-roll stars of the era (including Fats Domino and Little Richard), and the idea that she might succeed Monroe rather than just be a studio ploy erupted as an option.  She had success in the next couple of years with Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (a part she played on Broadway and then in film, and is arguably her best-known performance) and The Wayward Bus, a rare dramatic turn.  However, she quickly evaporated as a box office option, and made poor decisions with her career (turning down, for example, the Kim Novak part in Bell, Book, and Candle which was a big hit at Columbia).  By 1960, she was pretty much washed up at the age of just 27, relegated to supporting parts, independent pictures, and nightclub acts.  She eventually became the first mainstream American actress to go completely nude in the sound era in Promises! Promises!, which briefly reinvigorated her as a box office draw, but she didn't make anything of it (Mansfield had to turn down most of the offers heading her way at the time because she was pregnant with future Law & Order star Mariska Hargitay).  She even made a film toward the end of her career with her nemesis Mamie van Doren (Mansfield reportedly hated her), and probably wouldn't be remembered today were it not for her gruesome death.

Mansfield died on June 29, 1967, in a massive car crash when her driver ran into a tractor-trailer and killed all three adults in the front seat of the car, while Mansfield's three children (including Mariska) survived.  Despite urban legend, Mansfield was not decapitated during the crash, though her head received enough trauma that she almost certainly died upon impact-she was just 34 years old.  One can argue that this is the legacy she's most well-known for today: a buxom, blonde Marilyn knockoff who couldn't find Monroe's success on the big-screen, and is more famous in death than she ever could have hoped to be in life.  This month, we'll investigate the tangible legacy left behind by Mansfield in her movies, and try to get beyond the gorgeous facade we associate most with her.