‘The Girl Can’t Help It’ Blu-ray movie review

Looney Tunes directing maestro Frank Tashlin embraced the musical comedy genre back in 1956 with an influential, live-action rock and roll classic delivering a Cinemascope and DeLuxe Color visual smorgasbord.

The Girl Can’t Help It (Criterion, not rated, 2.36:1 aspect ratio, 98 minutes, $39.95) now boasts an eye-popping home theater debut in the high-definition format with a new, nearly pristine restoration culled from the original 35mm camera negative.

Jayne Mansfield stars, embracing her platinum blond bombshell persona, as Jerri Jordan — an unwilling, up-and-coming singer.

Threatened by loud mobster Fats Murdock (Edmond O’Brien), musical agent Tom Miller (Tom Ewell, who co-starred with Marilyn Monroe a year earlier in “The Seven Year Itch,” lucky guy) gets forced to make her a star, but all Jerri wants to do is cook for Tom as she starts falling for him.

Despite the higher-level comedic performances, the real stars of the film are the cavalcade of musicians unleashing that crazy new genre of music. The consistent and wild onscreen promotion features legendary performances from Little Richard, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran and Fats Domino just to name a few.

Tashlin and cinematographer Leon Shamroy’s visual might is equally potent. They treat the movie often like a cartoon, rich in saturated colors and offering laugh out loud silliness as Jerri (a living embodiment of Jessica Rabbit) walks down the street in a very tight dress as delivery men find an ice block rapidly melts at her presence or milk boiling over a bottle while a stunned onlooker gets cracked eyeglasses.

The visuals often sport a bath of blue lighting, be it on a hotel balcony or hued white walls, a refrigerator or Mansfield’s blonde hair. However, colors often explode onscreen referenced by singer Nino Tempo’s red dress, the sparkly purple curtains of a nightclub, Jerri’s red lipstick or a shiny red 1956 Lincoln Premier convertible.

Overall, viewers get a ridiculously entertaining and colorful nostalgia trip that may be impossible to believe would have existed in the stodgier 1950s.

Best extras: Criterion offers a selection of archival and newly created informational content starting with an optional commentary track originally released with the 2006 DVD version of the film.

Viewers can listen to Toby Miller, cultural studies scholar and film history professor from the University of California Riverside, opine on the minutiae of the narrative, perceived character motivations and even adding psychological profiling. He’s definitely lecturing and injecting opinions in his analysis that are not necessarily reflecting the filmmakers’ intentions. His analysis gets more interesting when discussing the musical artists and their careers.

For the new stuff, start with a pair of disc jockeys — WFMU’s Gaylord Fields and Dave “the Spazz” Abramson — making each other laugh for 30 minutes while they dive into the history of early rock and roll movies and then hone into “The Girl Can’t Help It.” They cover background on the onscreen performers such as The Chuckles, Nino Tempo and Eddie Fontaine, and offer details about the production and cast well beyond simply the music.

Next, look to critic David Cairns for 16 minutes on the shooting techniques and color strategies used by the director and cinematographer to deliver the overtly vibrant and somewhat surreal visual presentation and then move to an information-packed, 14-minute biography on Mansfield from biographer Eve Golden covering her rise and fall and love-hate relationship with the press.

Also, viewers get a 2017, 40-minute episode from Karina Longworth’s “You Must Remember” podcast covering dead blondes and focused on Mansfield.

Finally, the Blu-ray contains a whopping 21-minute interview from 2004 with cult filmmaker John Waters about his love for the movie and the early days of rock and roll. He pulls no punches about a film he considered “celebrating the beauty of bad taste” and packed with his memories of Mansfield, the singers and bands.

The packaging also includes a 12-panel, fold-out pamphlet containing an essay by film critic Rachel Syme and information on the restoration.

And, for more fun, a 12-page booklet offers excerpts from Tashlin’s 1952 book “How to Create Cartoons” visualizing the SCOT Art technique (square, circle, oval and triangle) with a new introduction by historian Ethan de Seife.