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.