‘The Girl Can’t Help It’: the 1956 rock and roll movie Paul McCartney could watch “again and again”
The emergence of rebellious youth culture and rock and roll were inseparable from one another in the 1950s, and much of this new era for music and for young people exploded onto the big screen, too.
It was a decade defined by the ‘live fast die young’ attitude of James Dean, the gyrating hips of Elvis Presley, and the sounds of guitars rumbling right through the very core of those who wanted to break out of the post-war stuffiness heralded by their parents. Rock and roll might have started to dominate the airwaves, but it defined many iconic movies of the era, as well, like the first of its kind, Blackboard Jungle.
The Sidney Poitier film was the first to use rock and roll as a part of its soundtrack, and soon a trend followed, with everything from Go, Johnny, Go! and Jailhouse Rock to Shake Rattle and Rock and Untamed Youth emerging as signifiers of a new era for letting loose. Naturally, a young Paul McCartney, excited by this new musical revolution, was attuned to these rock and roll movies, although there was one that has always stood out as his favourite.
The Girl Can’t Help It, released in 1956, saw Jayne Mansfield take on the lead, but in hiring a bunch of musicians to perform in the movie, Frank Tashlin’s film accidentally became one of the most star-studded documents of this new rock and roll movement. “I always love that one and watch it again and again,” McCartney said in an interview published on his website, paulmccartney.com.
Based on the short story Do Re Mi by Garson Kanin, the movie featured performances from the likes of Eddie Cochran, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Gene Vincent, Julie London, and The Chuckles. It’s absolutely stacked. When the movie arrived in the United Kingdom, John Lennon, then just 16, went to watch this movie filled with his early rock and roll influences, and it only inspired him more. He had to be like them.
When he met McCartney, who had also become obsessed with the movie, the budding musician reportedly played Lennon a very similar rendition of Cochran’s ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ inspired by the film. So, The Girl Can’t Help It actually played a pretty vital role in the early formation of the Beatles, allowing Lennon and McCartney to get one step closer to their dreams of being celebrated musicians.
It’s funny because the movie was never meant to have such an impact, but in bringing together such an iconic group of musicians, what was intended to be a Mansfield vehicle turned into something much greater in scope. If Lennon and McCartney hadn’t caught a screening of the movie as teenagers, would they have been encouraged to keep going with their musical pursuits?
The band loved the film so much that they even stopped the recording session for ‘Birthday’ back in 1968 so that they could catch a showing of the movie on TV. Clearly, The Girl Can’t Help It is a big deal to McCartney, who still gets a kick out of watching it over and over all these years later.
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