THE POM POM GIRLS bid you a hearty hello.
Matt Cimber (who would later helm the 1976 psycho-thriller sleeper THE WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA), SINGLE ROOM FURNISHED stars Jayne Mans- field in her final screen role, but is not exploitation by any stan- dard and feels out-of-place in this “drive-in” collection. The film opens with an odd prologue that Crown International tacked on following Mansfield’s fatal car crash—a eulogy by newspaper reporter Walter Winchell, who feels compelled to inform us that Jayne “could act” and that this is her finest performance. The fol- lowing drama is awkwardly con- ceived in order to shoe-horn Mansfield—whom we’re sup- posed to believe is playing one character in spite of varying hairstyles, accents and per- sonalities—into each of the anthological play’s disparate stories about the lives and loves of a New York tenement. Though limited, Jayne could act, by the way, though the bad ADR does its best to destroy all her efforts. Her role culminates in the portrayal of Eileen, a pros- titute who coddles a doll in a bride’s dress and drives a screw- ball sailor to suicide when she
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refuses his proposal of marriage. A talky, ponderous affair, the film is professionally but unimagi- natively photographed—mostly on sound stages—by future Academy-Award-winner Lászlo Kovács (billed here as Leslie), in the same year that he shot TAR- GETS for Peter Bogdanovich and just before he helped change the language of American cinema with EASY RIDER.
Our program winds down with three post-AMERICAN GRAFFITI teenage comedies set in Southern California and featuring many of the same
actors. The first and best of these, VAN NUYS BLVD., is an enjoyable time warp back to the “cruise-night” culture of the disco Seventies—when it was actually cool to live in a van down by the river. Take for instance Bobby (Crown International regular Bill Adler), a handsome van dweller who’s so full of angst he would rather leaf through car maga- zines than make love to his beautiful, naked girlfriend. Fed up with the small town life, Bobby heads for Van Nuys Blvd., where supposedly all the action is on a Wednesday night. There he falls in with a new group of friends, which includes the elder “Fonzie” of the Bou- levard (David Heyward as the mustachioed “Chooch”), a happy- go-lucky Ron Howard lookalike (Dennis Bowen) and a cute blonde with a van (PLAYBOY’s February 1973 Playmate Cynthia Wood, one of the visiting Centerfolds in APOCALYPSE NOW), who natu- rally challenges our hero to a race. It looks like they might have a foil in the uptight cop (Dana Glad- stone) who delights in writing tickets and wielding power; but instead of causing a lot of trouble for our heroes, he ends up iso- lated and handcuffed on Malibu Beach for the duration, the keys
Uptight cop Dana Gladstone leans on David Heyward, the “Fonzie” type of VAN NUYS BLVD.
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