She was the blonde bombshell with the clanger squeal who dabbled in witchcraft and wound up beheaded on a dead man’s road along with her loving Chihuahuas. Sounds so sassy, doesn’t it? Mansfield 66/67 is a documentary of her journey. It has a fantastic premise and is experimental enough to do justice to the crazy life of Ms Jayne Mansfield via TV-movie directors David Ebersole and Todd Hughes.
Precisely how strange the life of Mansfield really was is worth noting. The sex-kitten starlet of The Girl Can’t Help It released a Shakespearian poetry album and was fiercely intellectual despite handing over control of her assets to business partners while being a doting mother whose child was ravaged by a lion on her watch. Keep up!
The film begins by contextualising the culture in which she found herself. There are overviews of the changing attitudes as the 1950s switched to the 1960s and from traditional expectations of sexuality to the acknowledgement that women (like Mansfield) liked to fuck too. Her enjoyment of her own body and the attention it brought her is at the heart of a narrative that starts like an analysis of celebrity culture. Then, of, course, it applies the breaks as we are (wink, wink!) told that everything and nothing it presents may be true. It’s going to have its cake and eat it, too.
To express this surrealism the documentary seesaws between talking heads (including John Waters, Peaches Christ and Kenneth Anger), starchy academics. stars from the time, archive footage of Jayne’s interlingual tongue twisters on the laps of lip-smacking comedians, and animation. The animation is a blessing and a curse. Simple, campy depictions of her involvement with Satanism are actually so tasteless that they work beautifully in conveying what it is suggested Mansfield took for real regardless of the fact the daily experience of Satanism is less lightning-stuck hilltop, more a fierce individualism that is often decidedly more visually humdrum.
Am-dram, unfortunately, are the sections featuring a mix of modern-dancing university students taking lycra-luvving pot shots at the perils of fame. That said, the couple that dance the relationship between Satanist Anton LaVey and Mansfield do a decent lyrical job of recreating their supposed animal magnetism.
The great thing here, however, is that the documentary does not seek to sanitise its subject and you do actually get a sense of knowing something of the existence of Mansfield without feeling that her enigma is analysed into evaporation or otherwise grounded by generic causation theories of where it all supposedly went wrong.
Mansfield 66/67 is unorthodox and sometimes subtly subversive when poking fun at the glamour we expect of ‘the naughty’. While is it uneven at times, Jayne herself might well have squealed on seeing it.
MANSFIELD 66/67 / CERT: 15 / DIRECTORS: P. DAVID EBERSOLE, TODD HUGHES / STARRING: ANN MAGNUSON, RICHMOND ARQUETTE, KENNETH ANGER, A. J. BENZA, ANTON LAVEY / RELEASE DATE: JUNE 25TH
