The movie’s influence on rock music is significant. The film reached Liverpool, England in the early summer of 1957. It featured cameo performances of early rock ‘n’ roll stars such as Little Richard, Eddie Cochran, and Gene Vincent and His Bluecaps, fascinated a 16-year-old John Lennon by showing him, for the first time, his “worshiped” American rock ‘n’ roll stars as living humans and thus further inspiring him to pursue his own rock and roll dream. On July 6, 1957, 15-year-old Paul McCartney was introduced to Lennon after the latter had performed at a village church garden party with his skiffle group The Quarrymen. McCartney demonstrated his musical prowess to Lennon by performing “Twenty Flight Rock” in a similar manner to the way he had seen it played by Eddie Cochran in The Girl Can’t Help It. This led to Lennon inviting McCartney to join the group. McCartney talks about the movie in the documentary series The Beatles Anthology.
via The Girl Can’t Help It – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
JM had a genius level IQ, didn’t she?
I don’t know about her IQ but she was a well trained actress, and clever enough to control her PR…for a while.
I just looked it up. Supposedly she was at 163 which puts her in the Extraordinary Genius level…
“I didn’t come to Hollywood to be the girl next door. I came to be a movie star.” Jayne Mansfield, smart cookie 😉 .
Seriously cool bit of R&R history that I didn’t know!
And I still don’t know what a “skiffle group” is! Garage band?
Vickie, skiffle’s nearest equivalent in the US would, I guess, be a jug band. Skiffle was a brief but important phenomenon in the UK whose most famous exponent was arguably Lonnie Donegan, skiffle bands would use whatever came to hand, cheap guitars and bass, washboards. Like, as you say, garage bands and punk skiffle meant that virtually anyone could get together and make music; although the likes of Donegan would draw from pre-rock blues (Rock Island Line was a big hit) when skiffle faded Donegan moved into the novelty field scoring success with songs such as Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour On The Bed Post Over Night? (really!) and My Old Man’s A Dust Man! Of course, schoolboy skiffle group The Quarrymen metamorphosized into the Silver Beetles then The Beatles and became a real rock/pop group! Gosh, hope that didn’t send you to sleep. 🙂
The Girl Can’t Help It is a fine live action cartoon and Jayne Mansfield fits right into that Frank Tashlin world, it’s her best part. Oh, and it has one of the great adolescent, poor taste scenes of all time, featuring Ms Mansfield and a pair of, um, milk bottles… Subtle film-making!
Love the video clip.
It’s eye popping, on many levels!
OH YES!