Happy 60th Anniversary to Promises ... Promises! (1963)

 “The movie is a bedroom farce about a writer (Tommy Noonan) and his wife (Jayne) who are on a cruise with their friends, a famous actor (Mickey Hargitay) and his wife (Marie “The Body” McDonald). Tommy and Jayne want to have a baby, and Jayne takes various concoctions cooked up by the ship’s doctor. Tommy, who believes he is sterile, also drinks potency potions. There is a bedroom mix-up, a female impersonator who does Tallulah Bankhead imitations and two short sequences of Jayne thrashing about in bed bra-less, having disturbing dreams. It was because of these sequences that the movie was only shown in “art” theatres. Jet Fore, who was publicist for the movie, had erotic posters of Jayne printed up with a lot of words about the first time ever au naturel for a major star. Each sequence lasts about thirty seconds and bears no relation to the rest of the film which is as clean as a troop of Girl Scouts … In Promises … Promises! Jayne, wearing wedgies and skin-tight pedal pushers, straddles an open door and rubs her calf suggestively up and down against it. One expects the door to moan. It was theatre of sex at its most laughable.”

/ From Jayne Mansfield and the American Fifties by Martha Saxton, 1975 /

“It was at this point that Jayne made the most inexplicable, self-destructive move of her career, one that tipped her over from fading star to unemployable dirty joke. Actually, it was two moves: she agreed to star in the cheesy softcore porn film Promises … Promises! and to pose topless for Playboy … Why did Jayne agree to do nude scenes and in such a cheap film? She was not stupid or naïve when it came to show business – she had to have known no major studio would star her after this, and that family-friendly TV would be off-limits. But she had to work, even if she was a big nude fish in a small scummy pond.”

/ From Jayne Mansfield: The Girl Couldn’t Help It by Eve Golden, 2021 /

Today in smut history: the notorious Jayne Mansfield "nudie" movie Promises … Promises! was released sixty years ago (15 August 1963). It definitively ended the "reputable" part of her career.