The old movie The Girl Can’t Help It played in the Big Apple in 2006 and was intelligently reviewed in the Village Voice.  So I saw it on DVD, impossible though that makes it to judge the cinematography.

Frank Tashlin’s film is brazen with color, with “laminated sheen” (J. Hoberman), and is a 1956 guilty pleasure.  It’s a rock ‘n’ roll quasi-musical starring Jayne Mansfield, Tom Ewell and Edmond O’Brien, and featuring Little Richard, Eddie Cochran and even Julie London.  Most of the songs are trash; they’re “classic rock.”  Thankfully, some ballads are there.  Unthankfully, so is Tashlin’s script.

Enjoy yourself.  Mansfield is staggeringly beautiful, and although J. Hoberman is right that her “desire for domesticity” is “unconvincing,” at least it’s there.  The girl can’t help it?  Right, and she can’t help being highly sensual once Tashlin gets hold of her.  Not that The Girl is very hip, though.  The presence of the principals, e.g. Ewell, makes the film seem basically divorced from rock music’s feisty world.  Jayne ain’t cool . . . I take that back:  In a way she is.  Whatever the case, the flick is pure Hollywood commercialism.  Again, a guilty pleasure.

The Girl Can’t Help It film poster (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Because she is poor and pregnant and refuses to marry her irresponsible boyfriend, Maria Alvarez (Catalina Sandino Moreno, in a so-so performance)—the protag of Maria Full of Grace (2004)—agrees to become a criminally active “mule” who smuggles drugs from Colombia to exotic New York.  She swallows the pellets whole and carries them in her gut before excreting them in the NYC apartment of drug-dealing thugs.  The plot advances with the death of Maria’s fellow mule, Lucy, who gets fatally sick and is horribly manhandled by the thugs.  The conclusion of this film by Joshua Marston accepts what is indisputably the politically liberal view on illegal immigration (economically Colombia bad, America good, you see) and I have a problem with that.

Doesn’t mean it’s a bad picture, though.  Maria is absorbing, non-melodramatic and almost always convincing.  I do wonder, however, why Maria fails to perceive the moral seriousness of what she’s doing.  Oh well.

(In Spanish with English subtitles.)

Maria Full of Grace (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

How many a cappella pop songs exist in the world I don’t know, but “Easter Song” by Glad is likely to be one of the best.  The lead singer is enthrallingly good, both sober and cheerful, while collective vocals fill the bill superbly.  (This on the studio recording.)  A certain restraint is here but so is utter passion, summoned, of course, by the Resurrection.  Too, you’d better believe the song has hooks.

Edifying.

Woody Allen’s musical comedy, Everyone Says I Love You (1996), is a catastrophe.  Frequently it is not very funny because comedy and undistinguished dialogue don’t exactly go together unless the comedy is physical.  The movie features songs by Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, among others; and they are butchered by the bad voices of Julia Roberts, Drew Barrymore and Allen himself.  The only tolerable number is the first one, “Just You, Just Me,” because Edward Norton’s singing is more or less acceptable and the routine does not require much liveliness.  Any time a routine does require liveliness, you can forget about Allen providing it.  I can’t judge the choreography of Graciela Daniele, but it seems quite pleasant within this framework.

The film’s title derives from a Marx Brothers flick, and I wish Allen was as good a writer as those the Marx Brothers had.  The musical’s “book” can be obnoxiously stupid, as witness the tomfoolery involving Barrymore and Tim Roth.  Is it possible that when writing it Allen said to himself, “Oh well.  The books for those old musicals weren’t very good either”?  Damned if I know. 

Cover of Woody Allen

However many improbabilities arise in Jack Reacher (2012), it’s a vigorous, reasonably intelligent, engaging crime thriller starring Tom Cruise.  It works because I assume its source material, a Lee Child novel titled One Shot, is well-crafted.  (Am I wrong?)  Jack Reacher (Cruise) is a drifting ex-military cop who wishes to mete out justice to a sniper he knows, only to find out he needs to pursue a different offender, the true sniper.  Cruise and Rosamund Pike, playing a defense attorney, make a good team; both have energy and project smarts.  Christopher McQuarrie has directed and scripted the film with savvy, and nowhere is either the violence or the profanity excessive.

Jack Reacher is almost as good a crime drama as The LineUp and Bullitt.  Check it out.