Gossip columnist Walter Winchell appears in the prologue of Single Room Furnished to heap praise upon its late lead actress, Jayne Mansfield, calling it the work of “the dramatic star she always hoped to be.” Strong words coming from a man whose last name is now equated with libel. In other words, don’t you believe him. She’s not good, but the movie is awful.
Mansfield stretches more than her shirts by daring to play a woman with three different hair colors. Her sad story as Johnnie/Mae/Eileen — all the same character, just in different stages in a miserable life — is told to an angry teen girl (“Oh, you … foreigner!” she barks at her mother) by her father in the apartment building where it all went down. You get three stories in one, none of them worth your time, all in community-theater monologues you’d walk out of.
In the first, Frankie (Martin Horsey) and Johnnie recall the night they met, and she mopes over unmade egg salad sandwiches. He talks like Dustin Hoffman after getting kicked in the head by a horse. Twice. In the next tale, Mae finds herself pregnant and seeks the solace in Charley (Fabian Dean), her lumpy schmo of a neighbor.
He’s got his own girl troubles, as the marina fishmonger Flo (Dorothy Keller) has the hots for him. She’s quite a catch: “Charlie, where do clouds come from?” It’s like watching a courtship between Richard Kind and Frances Farmer. She gives him crabs (from the ocean), and he goes and plays with his balls (on a pool table). Then he proposes marriage, even if they’ve never gone on a date. So does the young john of Eileen, now a prostitute, until he breaks her doll and she makes fun of his monkey ears.
It’s the most heavyhanded melodrama imaginable. You could tell Mansfield thought she was truly going to win an Academy Award. Where was her head at? —Rod Lott
A brand-new groom strangles himself to death with his tie at his own wedding reception. A young woman running track experiences such a sudden jolt of speed that she literally can’t slow or stop until the bones snap out of her legs. On his wife’s 70th birthday, a man leaps through the window of their apartment building. Just before these acts, all three mention a “green monkey.” Call me crazy, but I think they just might be related. 
And for a while, this Japanese thriller is as well, as authorities attempt to draw the line that connects the three tragedies. What director Masayuki Ochiai does wrong is then steer the story from a procedural mystery to the supernatural element of the “creepy young girl” then so prevalent and in vogue among Asian cinema — and soon in American remakes. Even with accompanying surreal set design that suggests hiring Dr. Caligari as a contractor, what was interesting becomes unimaginative and tiresome. —Rod Lott
The cover of Ted V. Mikels’ 
Roughly halfway in, 10 Violent Women switches gears into WIP territory when the chicks get thrown in the clink. It has all the elements one expects from the subgenre — nude showers, lesbian warden — but none of the punch. The flick’s initial energy peters out right after the heist.