Director: Matt Cimber
Writers: Matt Cimber and Michael Musto from the play by Gerald Sanford
From: Cult Cinema
The story of a woman’s life told through three instances of love and heartbreak.
Single Room Furnished is the last movie Jayne Mansfield filmed before her death and that detail adds the exploitation element. Whereas the other movies in these sets are obviously exploitation—slasher, blaxploitation, sex comedies—this is exploiting her death. It even opens with an introduction by Walter Winchell eulogizing Mansfield. He’s supposed to add a gravitas, an importance to the film that the film itself doesn’t have. And the sincerity he brings to the eulogy feels like its own genre of exploitation.
The movie itself is pretty disappointing, both as Mansfield’s final performance and as a film itself. Much like the last movie I watched, Night Train to Terror, this is essentially an anthology film, only instead of horror, it’s a drama from three points in this woman’s life. The frame narrative is Pop, the super in an apartment building, telling Maria stories about Mansfield’s life for… reasons? The movie wants to be a morality tale of Maria learning a lesson from Mansfield’s life, but Mansfield doesn’t make any rash decisions. She’s unlucky in love and suffers for it.
The first story is about Frankie and Johnnie. Mansfield, in this story, is Johnnie (short for Johanna). The pair are married and talking on the fire escape outside their apartment. They reminisce about how they met and Frankie talks about wanting to get out of New York and see the world. The next morning, Frankie’s gone and, as Pop tells us in voice over, Johnnie loses the baby.
Oh yeah, Johnnie was pregnant. They didn’t mention that in the scene either.
The second story is about Flo and Charlie, another couple that lives in the building. Flo is trying to get Charlie to ask her out despite him being a “confirmed bachelor.” Finally she asks him out, but he’s “too bashful” to pick her up.
*cough* “Confirmed bachelor” is a euphemism for “gay.”
A few days later, Flo finds Charlie in a bar and he tells her (story within a story) about Mae (Mansfield) visiting and telling him she’s pregnant. He ends up asking Mae to marry him, changes his mind after talking to Flo. Proposes to Flo.
Flo comes down to the super’s apartment, sends the super to deal with Charlie, and tells Maria the rest of the story: She and Charlie offered to adopt the baby, but Mae gave it away to some other couple. After that, Mae started going by “Eileen.”
Eileen’s story is she’s a sex worker and comes home to find Billy in her apartment. He’s one of her customers that’s become obsessed. He says he loves her and proposes marriage, but he’s not listening to her say no. Finally he threatens her with a gun, but leaves and shoots himself instead.
Maria makes up with her mom and one of Eileen’s customers from the bar comes looking for Eileen. THE END
So Maria, who was fighting with her mother at the beginning for cramping her style has made up with her, but there’s no lesson to take from Mansfield’s story except maybe enjoy your innocence while it lasts. She doesn’t make any poor choices. In fact, she seems to deal with people honestly and gets poorly used because of it.
The movie itself was adapted from a stageplay and it has that look. Just lots of people talking to each other without moving and constantly relating information in monologue. The whole thing’s just inert. Mansfield is fine, but the roles that she’s given and lines she has to say in this movie are so overwrought. At times it feels like the writer or director was aiming for a Blanche DuBois from Streetcar and missed by miles.
I’d say this flick is only for Mansfield completists, but they would have already seen it. So skip it. The whole thing is kind of embarrassingly boring and the eulogy at the top makes watching it feel not quite ghoulish, but certainly unseemly.
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