Under the working titles Jayne Mansfield Reports, Mansfield Reports Europe and Mansfield By Night, this mondo was shot from 1964 to 1967 as Mansfield toured Europe. It has to be a mondo, because the movie really is all over the place, with the star meeting Italian roadside prostitutes, running from the paparazzi and attending the Cannes Film Festival, where she pretty much runs toward the paparazzi.
Complicating matters was that Mansfield died in a car accident in June 1967.
That didn't stop producer Dick Randall, whose career took him from the Catskills as a joke writer for Milton Berle to producing all manner of movies that I obsess over, such as Pieces, Mario Bava's Four Times That Night, The French Sex Murders, The Girl In Room 2A, For Your Height Only, Slaughter High and the only movie he directed, the absolutely ludicrous and completely awesome Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks.
Randall did what you'd expect. He hired Carolyn De Fonseca, the actress who often dubbed Mansfield in European movies like Primitive Love and Dog Eat Dog. So yeah. That's not even Jayne talking in a movie that's supposedly all about her deepest and darkest thoughts.
De Fonseca's voice is all over the movies covered on this site. She's a tourist in Eyeball. That's her doing Barbara Steele's voice in Terror-Creatures from the Grave. Marisa Mell in Secret Agent Super Dragon. She's Florinda Balkan's English voice in Fulci's Don't Torture a Duckling. And she makes vocal appearances in The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, The Case of the Bloody Iris, Torso, The Eerie Midnight Horror Show, Strip Nude for Your Killer, Emanuelle in America, Inferno and so many more. Her voice comes out of Sybil Danning's mouth in The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, Daria Nicolodi in Deep Red and Phenomena, Barbara Magnolfi in Suspiria, Tisa Farrow in Antropophagus, Dagmar Lassander in The House by the Cemetery, Laura Gemser in Ator the Fighting Eagle, Sabrina Siani in Throne of Fire and Corinne Clery in Fulci's The Devil's Honey.
That's why I write about movies. I would have never known otherwise that one person was the sound that I heard in so many movies that I count amongst my favorites, much less a mondo all about Jayne Mansfield.
With breathy narration, Mansfield visits nudist colonies, strip clubs, a gay bar and a massage parlor because this was the mid-60's and people were losing their minds over the sexual revolution. She also judges a transvestite beauty pageant, meets the topless girl band The Ladybirds and does the Twist to a song by Rocky Roberts & The Airedales.
You also get shots of Mansfield in Playboy - the equivalent of someone filming a magazine - as well as * scenes from her in Promises! Promises! and moments with her husband Mickey Hargitay in the movies Primitive Love and The Loves of Hercules.
With Mansfield dying before the movie could be complete, you just knew that news footage of her car accident scene would show up in this. There's also a tour of her home, the Pink Palace, by Hargitay. He was a plumber and carpenter before becoming a star, so he made her the heart-shaped swimming pool at the center of the all-pink landmark.
In the 1980 TV movie, The Jayne Mansfield Story, Arnold Schwarzenegger played Hargitay, who pretty much demystified and popularized bodybuilding for young athletes. He and Mansfield's daughter Mariska can be seen pretty much 24 hours a day now on the Law and Order TV shows.
One of the directors of this movie, Joel Holt, is also the narrator in Olga's House of Shame and Olga's Girls. Yes, that's the kind of movie you're about to revel in. Enjoy it. Wade in it. Experience it.
