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Single Room Furnished
List Price: Unknown [Buy now and save at Amazon]
This picture is known more by its soundtrack album than for itself; it received a fairly wide distribution in 1965, and being one of the last films by the ill-fated Jayne Mansfield, it has a high curiosity factor.
Introduced by Walter Winchell, who lauds it as a great accomplishment, and proof of Jayne's untapped potential as a serious actress, Single Room Furnished is a grim little collection of one-act plays about some tenement residents, told as a series of flashbacks (and flashbacks within flashbacks) to a young woman who idolizes Eileen (Jayne), the glamorous woman who seems to have all the freedom she wants.
That may not sound too bad, but Furnished is one very unattractive, badly acted, badly written movie. Jayne does have acting ability, but her choice of material is rotten, and the wordy and florid soliloquies here make everyone come off like idiots. The only acting surviors are the 'dowdy' pair. Their scenes are far too long, yet they come off as a nice Marty-meets-Miss-Marty couple, and thus retain some dignity. Literally everyone else is terrible, or miscast. The production values are so poor that the very good image and color quality of this disc just makes the sets look like what they are, almost -entirely undecorated flats. The costumes are no better.
Jayne keeps her clothes entirely on, betraying the sensational cover art (on the vhs, at least, this disc came to Savant as a test disc). Yet what she chooses to wear is a disaster ... ridiculously tight and unattractive dresses, along with her awful 'big' hairdo. Since the rest of the film wallows in a kind of poverty-stricken un-reality, one has to assume that Jayne imagined she looked attractive in these getups. The script's other characters, including a far-more attractive teenage girl, gush over Eileen's glamor and beauty, which adds to the falsity of the movie's impression.
Worse, Jayne's 'emotional' acting slides all over the map, with her NYC accent becoming a Southern drawl now and then.
Jayne Mansfield gave a number of perfectly fine performances within her range, as in the comedy The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw. But her later '60s output was a string of painfully unfunny sex comedies from Al Zugsmith and others, and this final stab at respectability from within the sleaze double-feature format isn't much of an improvement.
It's really only for Jayne Mansfield fans, and the morbidly curious.
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