This scrappy, shallow, incurious documentary about the final two years in the life of movie star Jayne Mansfield is disappointing, despite an interesting lineup of interviewees – including Tippi Hedren, John Waters, Mamie Van Doren, Kenneth Anger – and some academic figures promising perspectives from feminist and queer studies that don’t really materialise.
I was hoping for an exuberant and clear-sighted reappraisal of Mansfield as an underappreciated entertainment star who was working within a very male Playboy-style idea of blonde-bombshell sexiness. Instead, the film is bafflingly callous about her death in a car accident – and indeed the suffering of her young son, mauled by a lion at a private zoo – and weirdly obsessed with the tabloid headlines about Mansfield’s association with a very tiresome and seedy self-publicist called Howard Levey, who took the name “Anton LaVey” and styled himself America’s number one satanist.
This ridiculous figure supposedly put a curse on Mansfield’s husband, to whom he had reportedly taken a jealous dislike, and it was this “curse” that was indirectly to take its fatal effect on Mansfield – according to the overworked occult myth that is part of the tongue-in-cheek Kenneth Anger legend. Her connection with the dodgy LaVey is vastly exaggerated by this film, and winds up making Mansfield subservient to a boring and untalented man.
There are interesting moments: the clip of Mansfield almost sobbing about the suffering of troops when she returns from her USO trip to Vietnam is very striking. She was an intelligent woman with a flair for languages, but this film isn’t interested in trying to say anything all that original or insightful about her. Just yards and yards of stuff about “LaVey” and the satanist curse. A missed opportunity.