"The motion picture you are about to see was photographed in the grandeur of CinemaScope-pardon me (pushes the sides of the screen back to widen our view).... Sometimes you wonder who's minding the store!" (Tom Ewell, on screen). Frank Tashlin was the unsung cynic of the fifties cinema. For him, films are made where Wall Street meets Hollywood Boulevard, and to prove the point he fills the screen with mod-Brechtian devices like Tom Ewell's little routine at the beginning of The Girl Can't Help It. In this acid rock comedy (acid comedy, fifties rock), a would-be suburban housewife and mother is trapped inside Jayne Mansfield's body. Her boyfriend (Edmond O'Brien), bent on becoming the jukebox maven of the underworld, hires agent Ewell to make her a star, despite her disinclination and glaring lack of talent. (But this plot device allows us to see the likes of Little Richard, Gene Vincent, and Eddie Cochran at their performing best.) Tashlin had Jayne Mansfield's number from the start-this is her first film-and he used her to effect the ultimate in American black humor, as in the shot of her walking down the street with a milk bottle clutched to each breast. Is nothing sacred?