Single Room Furnished

Rating:
Summary: Jayne Mansfield in her final film appearance. She's DIVOON!
Review: .
This is a must-see for any diehard Jayne Mansfield fan. For anyone else, you can probably skip it.

Jayne's career was careening downhill at a fast pace by the time this film was made. Her looks were going, and her acting skills (never her best asset) are weak. Still, the film is an important artifact of Jayne's career, and a time capsule of America in the late 1960's.

Jayne's acting partners in this film appear to be from a community college playhouse or worse. Their dramatic skills make Mansfield appear to be another Sarah Bernhart by comparison.

The film tells a sad story of a woman who has lost her last dream and given up on life. One wonders if Jayne Mansfield felt the same way at this point in her career.

Sadly, Jayne was killed in a horribly brutal car accident shortly after completing this film. Although she didn't go out on a high note, theatrically speaking, it's still worth seeing her in her final film appearance.

I miss Jayne Mansfield. There wasn't another woman like her, and there never will be. (Although Anna Nicole tries VERY hard!)


Technical notes: The DVD version of this title is a real treat! For many years this film was only available on VHS with a very bad transfer. The colors were faded, the picture was blurry, and the sound quality was atrocious. On DVD, the film appears in widescreen, with a nice sharp picture and bright colors. It's worth paying the low price for the excellent quality of the DVD.


Rating:
Summary: WARNING: Mansfiled is HARDLY IN this movie!
Review: I bought this movie because of the description. I thought it would be a tale of an envious neighbor who is jealous of idol Jayne Mansfield. A fun, yummy script full of wit and fashion. Someone had said it is what "Single White Female" had been based on. NOT EVEN!

What I found was you need an attention span longer than the great wall of china if you want to have a chance at enjoying this movie. That and you shouldn't be a fan of Mansfield, since she is hardly IN IT! The only good scene is the end, and then surprisingly, just when it gets half-good, it stops. It ends.

In one word: BORING
In one phrase: The description (on the cover) is OVERRATED.

Rating:
Summary: Jayne proved to her disbelievers that she could act!
Review: Single Room Furnished was, as everyone knows, Jayne's last completed film before her untimely death. Jayne plays three characters of a struggling misfit that never was given a fair chance in life. Until the end is revealed, movie goers find that her characters were describing one lady all along. " Eileen " was a mystery to anyone that knew her and her world was in a dark place never to find happiness.
Being a " Mansfield Fan", I truly was questioning my purchase of the film because of her outstanding performances given to The Girl Can't Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?....Now looking back over them all, it was evident that Jayne was a very
good actress and even though the film was low budget, she truly shined in this film. Give it a chance and you will see what I mean. Jayne could have been so much more and she proves it in this film.

Rating:
Summary: worth watching
Review: The movie is not good but a lot can be learned by watching it through, even though it drags. The 1950s 'babe' played by Jayne is a period piece, but having lived in Las vegas for the past five years, I can tell the readers of this review that the type is alive and well in this city. The film is about a certain niche, created by men and probably by religion too, and into this niche women step and become stigmatized. The whore or babe is like the witch in the medieval period - something demonic and devilish. I assure you, the values in the film are not out-of-date. The movie also is an interesting source of info about ethnicity and regionalism - espec. Italian and the NYC area. And you see in this a connection to Las Vegas too. The film, if it teaches anything, teaches us that we are far less emancipated, liberated, rational, liberal, etc. in regard to sex and to women than we thought we were. Again the parallel to witchcraft is a good one: naive liberals thought the witch-hunting was over in the early 1700s. In fact, witches were burned in all major European ocuntries into the late 1700s. And 1950s babes a la Mansfield are not only the adult identity of many, especially in Las Vegas, in the year 2000, but are probably the role-models of 6 and 7 year olds. .... the movie in another sense is an epigone of Italian neo-realism. I am adding this last bit just so poeple will be more inclined to accept the savvi-ness of the first part of my review.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent quality DVD!
Review: There is something poignant about watching Jayne Mansfield in her last film role. There is also something prophetic as well, for Jayne Mansfield would never be remembered as a Grande Dame of screen dramatics. Perhaps her admirable attempt coupled with the reality of her untimely passing make watching her performance even more fascinating. What Mansfield brings to this role is a mixed bag of hysterics and brood. But we never forget, not even during a dramatic scene in which Mansfield (with shabby Bronx accent) admits to being "in the family way", that we are watching an icon of a bygone era attempting to inhabit the skin of something "mod". SINGLE ROOM FURNISHED almost plays like a cautionary tale for the bombshells of the future. Yet that was surely not the original intent.

I first saw this picture decades ago on home video. The source for that video was so faded and tattered. For years I recalled the "faded glory" aspect of the print. Watching this wonderful DVD master was eye-opening. The colors are beautiful and the widescreen presentation shows little to no wear from the source print (except for the dates soundtrack which is the weak link here). An absolutely stellar remastering on the video level. Watching SINGLE ROOM FURNISHED 2 decades later was a revelation to me and a delight. But in the final analysis, this low-budger affair is far from perfect. But perhaps that is the essence of Jayne Mansfield's legacy.