User Reviews

Italian directors used to change their name to Americanized names so that people wouldn't think their movies were Italian. Matt Cimber? He used the name Matteo Ottaviano when he directed this.

This was Jayne Mansfield's final filmed starring role, shot by Cimber, her thrid and final husband. It briefly came out in 1966, but was pulled from theaters and re-released a year after she died. The only other film that she technically did after this was a cameo role in A Guide for the Married Man.

Mansfield shines here, despite the darkness of the story, as she plays three roles of three women who may closer than you'd think. It starts with innocence and ends with prostitution, all within one rundown New York City tenement.

I love that this movie begins with a speech from Walter Winchell, packed with hyperbole, as he describes how this is the gift that Jayne left behind for us. Between the Crown International Pictures title card and this soliloquy, I was already in love with this movie before it even began.

This low-budget end to Ms. Mansfield's career is a curious mix of emptiness and hope that is hard to put your finger on. Dorothy Keller as Flo (who resembles Estelle Parsons) is sad and touching. Fabian Dean as Charley is Everyman, and Jayne Mansfield (in one of her best performances - a great listener) "plays" three roles and seems to connect with all of them. Beautiful work.

A 4 out of 10. Best performance = Ms. Mansfield as Eileen. The final third of the story is the most interesting. The guy who plays Billy gives a heartfelt disturbing "performance" and Jayne seems tapped into something special and uplifting. Great closing shot and music. Decently directed with an average script - a bit morose, but empathetic to the plight of these trapped souls. The young woman playing Maria is very fetching, but it's Ms. Mansfield in her swan song that hits the bulls-eye.

I watched SINGLE ROOM FURNISHED as part of BCI Eclipse' Drive-in Cult Classics (featuring Crown International Pictures releases) on DVD. This one stands out for its dullness.

Johnnie's (Joanne) young husband (no doubt a latent-homosexual) abandons her to go to sea with a pal that joined the Navy four months earlier.

After changing her name to Mae (and, dying her hair), she is pregnant. Desperate, she throws herself at the dysfunctionally shy, overweight salesman, who lives downstairs.

After proposing (he feels sorry for her), he realizes his true love for the plain fisherman's daughter; and, proposes to her in a bid for matrimonial happiness. He dumps Mae over the phone from the bar.

She then changes her name to Eileen; and, is left with a string of 'suitors' who become so numerous that even she has to regard herself as a prostitute. The only men in her life are emotionally unstable boys willing to kill themselves over her, or crass traveling salesmen out for a good time!

That may not sound too bad, but SINGLE ROOM FURNISHED is one very unattractive, badly acted, badly written movie.

Jayne Mansfield 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 scenes are far too long; the production values are so poor that the very good image and color quality of this disc just makes the sets and scenery look like what they are, almost-entirely undecorated flats. The costumes are no better.

What the heck was the point of this movie? Don't let your husband go off the navy because your life afterwords will be horrible? First, the good: Jayne Mansfield. She's not amazing in the movie, but she carries the movie and her material. I also think she had a bubbly personality which was present in most of her scenes. Again, nothing amazing.

Now, the horrible: For 75% of this movie, we find ourselves trapped in a bad Twilight Zone episode where we learn the bad material problems of an ugly couple named Flo and Charlie. Some of the worst storyline and acting I've seen. Especially from the woman, who even wears a pillow under her shirt for "old fat woman" cliché. Oh and what causes most of their problems? Charlie doesn't want to be a fisherman like his old lady Flo. Oh the humanity...

Skip this one, unless you love Jayne Mansfield....a lot.

This cheap and offbeat, yet astute and absorbing slice of everyday life drama centers on the forlorn and unfortunate plights of the down in the dumps occupants of a seedy urban apartment complex. Writer/director Matt Cimber displays real skill and sensitivity at capturing the underlying sense of despair, regret, and desperation that defines the common working class folks who just sort of quietly exist. The acting by a sturdy cast is truly exceptional. Jayne Mansfield in her final filmic farewell in particular shines in a complex and challenging part as a troubled lady with multiple personalities: she starts out as hopeful and innocent teenager Johnnie, then becomes dejected pregnant cocktail waitress Mae, and ultimately devolves into jaded, worn-out prostitute Eileen. The third story centering on Eileen offers the most poignant moments, with a memorably crazed turn by Walter Gregg as creepy stalker sailor Billy and a positively heart-wrenching climactic closing shot. However, Mansfield ain't the whole show. Special kudos are also in order for the adorable Dorothy Keller as sweet fisherwoman Flo and Fabian Dean as amiable big lug Charley; their scenes together are both highly affecting and beautifully acted. Moreover, there's fine supporting work from Billy McGreene as folksy superintendent Pop, Terri Messina as naive, impressionable teenager Maria, Martin Horsey as Johnnie's gawky, restless husband Frankie, and Bruno VeSota as one of Eileen's oddball customers. Laszlo Kovacs' appropriately plain cinematography and James Sheldon's moody, melancholy score are both up to par. Although a tad slow and clunky in spots, this film overall sizes up as a lovely and touching little sleeper.

This posthumously released final vehicle for Mansfield comes with an introduction by Walter Winchell, who claims it proves Jayne really was capable of the serious dramatic acting she'd always wanted to do. Nice of him to say, but unfortunately the film contradicts him from the get-go.

She plays a poor Bronx innocent just out of school (something that at an increasingly heavy-set 34 years, wearing ridiculous fake platinum tresses down to her waist, Mansfield looked pretty silly trying to convey) whose young husband (Martin Horsey, just awful) leaves her for the romantic freedom of the Navy (?!). She then slips down a long tragic ladder to prostitution. Presumably because Mansfield died before filming was completed, the movie was padded out with tedious scenes about the tentative romance between "Marty"-like plain, middle-aged "little people" Charley (Fabian Dean) and Flo (Dorothy Keller).

Admittedly, nobody has much of a shot at acting well here, since the script is derived from a play by Gerald Sanford—and it absolutely stinks of the kind of mouldy Off-Off- Broadway oldie in which condescending sympathy toward the quaint urban working class, heavy-handed pathos and labored stabs at "poetry" (talking about the moon and the stars, of course). Plays like this were/are the bastard children of good if dated ones by Clifford Odets, William Inge and so forth. They often attract actors of middle-class suburban background who think them so "real" (because said actors have no idea what the urban or rural poor are actually like), and because they invariably offer opportunities for showy histrionics.

This was an odd first feature project for Matt Cimber (beyond the fact that he was Jayne Mansfield's last husband—albeit already her ex-husband when they filmed this), whose erratic later career encompassed sexploitation, blaxploitation, an unusual giallo ("The Witch Who Came from the Sea"), and two Pia Zadora vehicles. It's much stagier than his later efforts, but that's doubtlessly because the script is all very theatrical yada-yada.

Mansfield does try to differentiate her heroine's different personas as she adopts different names and hairstyles in an attempt to restart her life: Naïve young Johnny, abandoned pregnant brunette Mae, then as slutty Eileen. But she seems to think changing wigs means she's acting a new character, as opposed to one going through painful changes. She's finally at home playing cartoon sexpot Eileen—exactly the same type she'd essayed from "The Girl Can't Help It" though "Guide for the Married Man." When that section turns serious, she benefits from "Eileen's" mostly playing listener to the monologue of unstable younger Billy lover (Walter Gregg, who grapples heroically with so much bad dialogue). But when it turns into her monologue, Jayne is just as overworked and unbelievable as the script. Finally, the film makes both of them ridiculous, though it means to make them tragic.

Earnestness does count for something, so in the end it's impossible to detest "SRF." It tries so hard, as do its actors. But there isn't a moment that isn't stilted and/or phony.

The movie starts out with a monologue explaining the greatness of Jayne Mansfield and how this movie was her finest dramatic roll. Jayne goes from housewife to prostitute giving us a view of her diverse acting skills. Billy M. Dean plays the landlord who reminded me of Grandpa from the Munsters. We have an Italian mom praying to a statue of the Virgin Mary for her daughter. The landlord tells young Mary the story of Jayne Mansfield. The dialogue was bad as was most of the acting. Sometimes the movie digresses to someone telling a story in a story. In a sea of bad acting, Jayne did manage to shine through, but it was like saying Will Ferrell is a great actor when he is in a movie with Steven Seagal and Steve Austin. For some reason Jayne changed her accent from character to character, even though they were the same person. Note that the music had no influence on how the go-go dancers movie.

The "R" rating is way too high by today's standards. No sex, nudity, or swearing.

This movie would be unwatchable if not for Jayne Mansfield making her final screen appearance. Based (painfully obviously) on a stage play, it has characters who seem borrowed from "Marty" and other sources pouring out platitudes on love, loneliness etc. The actors deliver their lines as though each of them were alone on-stage---sorry, on-screen. (One scene takes place on a fishing pier. It could just as well been set in a park, or a cemetery, or the moon for that matter.) Mansfield plays either three characters or one character with three names. The third act---sorry, sequence---is the best, with Mansfield as "Eileen," the bar hostess (amongst other activities). She entertains a convention of toymakers (made me nostalgic for when such items were actually manufactured here, as opposed to China or elsewhere) then struts regally along the city street (I imagined Little Richard popping out from an alley: "The girl still can't help it….") to her "single room, furnished" to find her twitchy sailor boyfriend (who today would be a "stalker," I guess) waiting for her. The sequence is filmed in mostly long takes with stark lighting, as though the apartment were in outer space with a searchlight finding the actors. Mansfield registers an astounding range of emotions as Eileen takes off her make-up and prepares to retire for the night as the sailor (shriekingly overplayed by an actor whose last film this also apparently was) recounts his life story and rants about them running off to get married. The most striking shot is of Eileen lying on her bed with her face in front of the camera with the sailor's face hovering overhead; her sad street-hardened wistfulness is absolutely on mark as she hints at the sort of "work" she's done in the room. "'Prostitute' is a beautiful word," she murmurs almost dreamily, "compared to 'whore' and the others…." For a moment she gets caught up in the sailor's giddy plans to go live on an island but then when he accidentally breaks a prized doll of hers given by a dead former lover, she turns on him and drives him away. Even as she laughs in his face, her regret is visible just behind her eyes. It's a mature professional performance, filling me with regret that her talent always had to play second fiddle to her, um, natural attributes. It seems especially unfair that she was always "in Marilyn Monroe's shadow." Both were eager to perform well but every line Monroe ever said on-screen sounded like a line reading. Mansfield could convey the impression that her character had an existence beyond the camera's range.

I rented "Room" from Facets along with "Female Jungle," Mansfield's screen debut. The latter is hardly the worst no-budget early-Fifties "noir" I've ever seen, in fact parts of it share the kind of Expressionistic malevolence seen in Fritz Lang's earlier "The Big Heat." (It's one of only a few films directed by stalwart B-movie actor Bruno VeSota who also makes a cameo appearance as one of the toymakers in "Room.") Mansfield is in only a couple of scenes in "Jungle" as the bed-hopping "bimbo" but her vitality and ease on camera are unforgettable. She already comes off as a seasoned pro. There of course have been a lot of American actresses with "sex appeal" but oddly enough, not that many for whom it folds seamlessly into the rest of their personality as opposed to just "fronting." (Want an example? Okay, here's one: Patricia Neal---yeah, that's right, from "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and "Hud." That's one sexy adult woman totally confident in who and what she is. Want a more recent example? Okay---Elizabeth Ashley. Watch her in that elevator scene in "Paternity" where she's just standing and talking ---oh, man. I'm there if called.) Such actresses have a better shot at full flowering in Europe where they prefer women not to be cartoons (unless of course they're goofing on some Yank icon e.g. in "Barbarella.") Mansfield had some European roles but of course back then (to paraphrase a line from "Bladerunner") "If you're not Hollywood, you're little people." Seems a damn shame she didn't live longer or more recently. There are just a lot more avenues of employment available nowadays. Don't even get me started on the position Orson Welles would have as a contemporary filmmaker….

So there it is, my little tribute to an American actress and woman who, in my humble opinion, deserves to be more than just a lingering joke in the cultural lexicon---"Oh yeah, the big boobs---didn't she get decapitated in a car accident?" (Actually the head was not completely severed.) At least she didn't go into a funk and kill herself like Monroe. (Okay, okay, like everyone I can't be "really sure" what happened to Monroe, but only in the impractical sense that one can never be "really sure" about anything.) I find it worth watching "Special Victims Unit" on TV just to see Mansfield's daughter Mariska Hargitay pursuing sexual predators. I like to think that if there's such a thing as "looking down from above" (which I doubt), Jayne is doing that now in approval of the kind of serious, searing part she herself was never considered "qualified" to do…..

Only the lonely ones who have truly had their heart broken and the loves of their lives vanished may get this film. Beautiful legendary Jayne Mansfield goes places in her acting in this film. She takes us on a emotional journey. No, its not big budget...no, its not edited well...sometimes, it has a tacky feel---but watch Jayne act--she IS this woman. She takes off her hairpiece and her makeup and we get down to the nitty gritty in the last and most emotional film of her career. Take your "idea" of Jayne Mansfield out of your mind and concentrate on her story and the emotions she conjours up. Killed before the film was complete at the tender age of 34, she proves that acting wise-had she lived-she would have given us much more.