YMMV / The Girl Can't Help It

• Just Here for Godzilla: Most of the film is a romantic comedy about Tom Ewell and Jayne Mansfield but it's sandwiched between music performances by Abbey Lincoln, Fats Domino, Little Richard, The Platters among others. As such most people come to see a document of early rock music and stick around for an entertaining fifties spectacle with a surprisingly prescient look at what would become iconic music.
• Love to Hate: A lot of people like Fats Murdoch, the lecherous creepy gangster by Edmond O'Brien, mostly because he's funny, the hero is kind of bland, and his song "Rock Around the Rockpile" emblematic of commercialized easy rock music, is actually not so bad.
• Older Than They Think: The Julie London sequence "Cry Me A River" is more or less the first music-video.
• One-Scene Wonder: Most of the rock musicians have single scene cameos but the staging of each sequence makes them the most memorable part of the film:
  • Little Richard sings over the title credits and then appears and performs "Ready Teddy" and "She's Got It", and his performance is so amazing that he overshadows Jayne Mansfield's Supermodel Strut montage.
  • Abbey Lincoln performs a Gospel song "Spread the Word" while wearing a red dress (incidentally Marilyn Monroe's dress from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, i.e. the same outfit) against a cobalt blue background, with the sexy staging and lighting underwriting the religious nature of the song.
  • Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps sing "Be Bop A Lula" in a window jam session, while Eddie Cochrane performs "Twenty Flight Rock", the latter performance was apparently mimicked by Paul McCartney for his audition to get into John Lennon's band.
  • Fats Domino in the finale performs "Blue Monday" and the crowd of teenagers dance barefoot to the big band music.
  • Julie London is an important offscreen character but then she appears in "Cry Me A River" in every single room, in what is more or less the first music-video, since unlike the staging of the other numbers which is presented diegetically (i.e. part of the background and setting of an entirely unrelated scene placed there for Excuse Plot), this one is more or less a standalone part integrated just for that.