Reflections on ... Too Hot to Handle (1960)

“Under the naked glare of the spots they do their stuff … the girls who rock the night as tease queens!”

"The Sizzler You Read About in Playboy Magazine!"

"In the fall of 1959 Jayne made a couple of shabby British films in her first independent ventures. She played "Midnight Franklin", a Soho nightclub dancer, more accurately a stripper, in Too Hot to Handle directed by Terence Young. Midnight was in love with Johnny Solo, doomed owner of The Pink Flamingo club. The censors refused to release the movie in this country under its American title, Playgirl After Dark. Jayne suggested that someone get a spray gun and cover her offending areas. But the process cost more than the budget of the film."

/ From Jayne Mansfield and The American Fifties (1975) by Martha Saxton /

Recently watched: lurid British noir crime drama Too Hot to Handle (1960), concerning the inexorably violent rivalry between two competing striptease clubs in the underbelly of Soho, London’s neon-lit glamour jungle! Between the two club owners, we’re seemingly encouraged to sympathise with Johnny Solo, proprietor of striptease emporium The Pink Flamingo Club. (The unappealing actor who plays him - Leo Genn - is a total charisma by-pass). Atomic-era sex kitten-gone-berserk Jayne Mansfield is platinum blonde American showgirl deluxe Midnight Franklin, Solo’s glamorous moll and the star attraction at The Pink Flamingo. Rounding out the cast are Christopher Lee as Solo’s untrustworthy thug henchman Novak (of course he’s untrustworthy – he’s played by Christopher Lee and wears a pencil-line spiv moustache!), Austrian actor Karlheinz Bohm (who in the same year would star in chilling cult classic Peeping Tom) and young starlet Barbara Windsor as naïve, doomed underage stripper Ponytail ("the girl with the rock'n'roll hairstyle"). Lee played an extremely similar role in another trashy exploitation film released the same year, also set in the Soho burlesque milieu: Beat Girl (1960).

Slumming American superstar Mansfield – on loan from her Hollywood studio Twentieth Century Fox - made two fairly undistinguished films in the UK in 1960 (the second one is heist thriller The Challenge. Of the two, Too Hot is considerably more fun). The gangster subplot of Too Hot is pretty unconvincing, but the film sparks to life when it embraces sexploitation and switches to the scantily-clad exotic dancers’ ultra-camp musical numbers and their bitchy dressing room confrontations. Mansfield herself – looking lushly zaftig, her waist cinched to almost Vampira proportions – coos two outrageous songs (“Too Hot to Handle” and  the calypso-style “You Were Made for Me”). Both  are sheer sex kitten bliss (and the film’s highlights by a long shot). When we’re first introduced to Midnight, Mansfield is wearing a tight white leotard and busy auditioning new dancers. The camera fixates on her voluptuous marshmallow thighs and butt (Mansfield is “thicc”, as millennials would put it) and she suggests one of cartoonist Robert Crumb’s big-assed Amazonian dream women come to life. Mansfield was 26 here and – although no one knew it at the time – she’d already “peaked” and the “reputable” legitimate stage of her film career was ending. From here on in, she’d mostly star in low-budget European quickies (or “Nudies!” as Neely O’Hara in Valley of the Dolls would call ‘em).

Pre-Carry On movies Windsor is 22 years old here (her character Ponytail is meant to be 16. One of the male characters actually refers to her as “jailbait”). Later Windsor would claim that Mansfield was threatened by her youth and beauty, refused to make eye contact and demanded that Windsor darken her platinum blonde hair so as not to compete onscreen. To which I argue, the age difference between them was four years and Windsor’s hair (and fake ponytail) in the film is the palest albino shade of white-blonde!

/ Young starlet Barbara Windsor as Ponytail in Too Hot to Handle (1960). Check out those brows! /

Too Hot has a complicated history. In the UK it originally received an X rating. A shorter, censored cut was released in the US with the alternate title Playgirl After Dark. Most weirdly, it was originally filmed in gleaming better-than-life Eastmancolor but the current version in wide circulation is black-and-white! Apparently when Too Hot was made available for television broadcast, most people still had black-and-white TV sets and that’s the print that survives. On YouTube you can view Mansfield’s musical sequences in lush, gorgeous colour and it’s a vastly different, infinitely superior experience. Someone needs to sort out a digitally re-mastered full-colour DVD or Blu-ray of Too Hot to Handle!

Watch Too Hot to Handle online here.

/ German-language for Too Hot to Handle in colour /



/ One of Mansfield's musical numbers in colour. This sensational sheer "nude-look" dress is a somewhat tamer version of the infamous gown Mansfield wore onstage in her Las Vegas cabaret act /