General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Girl Can't Help It

The Girl Can't Help It is a 1956 American musical comedy directed, produced, and co-written by Frank Tashlin for Twentieth Century-Fox, starring Tom Ewell, Jayne Mansfield, and Edmond O'Brien, in which a washed-up talent agent is hired by a gangster to turn the gangster's girlfriend into a singing star. It is remembered both as a showcase of first-wave rock and roll performers and as a satire of the Hollywood star-making machine.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	December 1956, Twentieth Century-Fox; copyright registered 19 December 1956 (LP7423)¹
Director/producer	Frank Tashlin, who also wrote the screenplay with Herbert Baker, from the story "Do Re Mi" by Garson Kanin¹
Stars	Tom Ewell as Tom Miller, Jayne Mansfield as Jerri Jordan, Edmond O'Brien as Marty "Fats" Murdock¹
Musical guests	Little Richard, Fats Domino, Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps, Eddie Cochran, Julie London, Abbey Lincoln, The Platters, Ray Anthony, and others¹
Format	CinemaScope, color by De Luxe, Westrex sound; 8,893 feet on 12 reels¹
Mansfield's role	Her first starring role, in her first film under a 20th Century-Fox contract²^•³
Home video	Released by the Criterion Collection on Blu-ray and DVD (Spine #1120)⁴

Spoilers

Plot

Tom Miller, a washed-up talent agent, is summoned by Marty "Fats" Murdock, a former slot-machine king recently released after serving time for income tax evasion. Fats hires Tom to promote his girlfriend Jerri Jordan into a "star canary," which would make her, in his view, worthy enough to marry. Tom is skeptical about Jerri's abilities until he meets her. Jerri, for her part, longs to be a simple homemaker and laments that men see her only as a sexpot. Tom takes her to a string of nightclubs, instructing her to flaunt her figure, and she dazzles the owners while Tom drinks progressively more. Fats, jealous, has his henchman Mousie tail Tom. At a rock and roll concert, Jerri sings Tom a love song and it turns out she can sing after all.¹^•⁶

Production

The film began as a different project. A January 1956 Hollywood Reporter news item announced that Tom Ewell would star with Sheree North in a film to be directed and produced by Nunnally Johnson from an original story titled "Do Re Mi" by Garson Kanin. By July 1956 the project had been reassigned, and the finished film credits Tashlin as director, producer, and co-screenwriter with Herbert Baker, with Kanin's story retained.¹

Production ran from mid-September to early November 1956, beginning just as Mansfield was finishing her run in the Broadway play Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?.¹^•⁵ The working title "Do Re Mi" survived as the film's alternate title. Leon Shamroy was the cinematographer, Lionel Newman supervised and conducted the music, and James B. Clark edited.¹^•⁴

The opening gag and visual style

The film opens with a self-referential sequence: the credits begin in black and white at a 1.33:1 non-widescreen ratio as Tom Ewell strides forward and announces he will play "Tom Miller." Explaining that the picture has been "photographed in the grandeur of CinemaScope," he pushes back the edges of the frame to widen the screen, and when he mentions the "gorgeous, life-like color by De Luxe," the image changes from black and white to color. He then observes that the story is about music, at which point a jukebox blares over the rest of his dialogue. The film ends with Tom pulling the edges of the screen together like a theatrical curtain.¹

Tashlin came to features from cartoon work, having been a cartoonist and animation director early in his career, and his live-action films retain absurdist sight gags, anarchic energy, and breakneck pacing that at times play like live-action cartoons.² The most cited example is the shot of Mansfield clutching two milk bottles to her bosom as the milk boils over; Jean-Pierre Coursodon, co-author of American Directors, Volume II, noted that Tashlin's admirers found it irresistible precisely because it was so crude and obvious.³ A critic writing for Reverse Shot reads the opening ratio gag as wry self-reflexivity about the industry standard of the era, and the film's closing as a peek at a future of warring formats.⁷

Rock and roll on screen

The film assembles a roster of performing musicians playing themselves: Little Richard and His Band, Fats Domino, Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps, The Platters, The Treniers, Eddie Cochran, Eddie Fontaine, The Chuckles, Abbey Lincoln, Julie London, Ray Anthony, and Nino Tempo, among others.¹ Little Richard performs the title song, written by Bobby Troup, which drowns out Ewell's dialogue in the opening sequence as the camera pans to a jukebox.⁸ ACMI's catalog describes the film as the first big-budget rock and roll movie of the fifties, with seventeen songs of the era.⁹

Its place in the genre is notable. David Sanjek's chapter in Rock 'N' Film: Cinema's Dance With Popular Music states that, apart from the Elvis movies, it was the only film about rock 'n' roll made by a major studio in the 1950s.¹⁰ The Criterion essay by Rachel Syme calls it a genre pioneer as a "music film," noting that for many viewers it was the first time they had ever seen these acts on screen.¹¹

Reception and reputation

François Truffaut's assessment, quoted by AFI Silver, called it "more than a good film, more than a funny film, more than an excellent parody; it is a kind of masterpiece of the genre," adding that "it's more beautiful and more successful each time you see it."² The film historian Foster Hirsch, author of Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties (2023), described it as "a mother-lode time capsule and a double parody: of rock music, which in 1956 was just breaking through to mainstream culture, and of the Hollywood ritual of star-making."² Filmmaker John Waters counts it among his favorite films and a major influence on his own work, saying Tashlin "understood how beautiful bad taste could be."¹¹

The film has remained in circulation through restorations and repertory screenings, and the Criterion Collection issued it on Blu-ray and DVD with a commentary by scholar Toby Miller, a video essay by critic David Cairns, an interview with John Waters, on-set footage, and interviews with Mansfield (1957) and Little Richard (1984).⁴

Runtime discrepancy

Reported running times differ across catalogs: the AFI Catalog lists 96 or 98–99 minutes, Criterion lists 97 minutes, JustWatch lists 1 hour 38 minutes, and several repertory cinemas list 98 or 99 minutes.¹^•⁴^•¹²^•²

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026