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MovieMail's Review
The great Tony Randall plays Rockwell Hunter - an original Mad Men type – in this classic Hollywood comedy with Jayne Mansfield. Julian Upton targets this ‘live-action cartoon’.
Frank Tashlin’s background in animation ranged from Max Fleischer to Disney and Columbia, but with their adult sweep and a frenetic cynicism, his later features — such as The Girl Can’t Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?— shared a dark heart with the most sardonic of the Warner Brothers’ cartoons. Taking broad sideswipes at materialism and celebrity culture with a rich palette of primary colours, energetic visuals and orchestral bounce, Rock Hunter? is a prime example Tashlin’s ‘live-action cartoon’ style, and how it sugared his potent, acidic take on modern living and prettified his coarse approach to sexual politics.
The great Tony Randall plays Rockwell Hunter, an original Mad Men type: mild-mannered executive struggling to keep afloat in the moronic world of television advertising. Eager to get blonde bombshell movie star Rita Marlowe (Jayne Mansfield) to endorse his firm’s ‘Stay-Put’ lipstick, Hunter winds up going along with her plan to make her ex-lover (Mickey Hargitay, soon to be the real-life Mr Mansfield) jealous by posing publicly as her new beau. But the charade turns Rock into an overnight celebrity himself, with calamitous consequences for his private life.
Tashlin wastes no time setting up a broad range of (still remarkably modern) targets — shameless consumerism, the corporate ladder, television and the meaninglessness of fame — but attacks them with glossy Eastmancolor, palatial CinemaScope and a firm, lecherous eye on Mansfield herself; the upshot is that Rock Hunter seems to wallow in exactly what it is satirising: mainstream US fifties culture. This is all part of its appeal, of course, but the film gets most of his laughs and achieves most of its insights when it calms down. In these moments, the interplay between the comically ill-matched Randall and Mansfield (a far more gifted and articulate performer than she ever got credit for) is at its most effective, and the support from an ageing Joan Blondell — once a blonde bombshell herself, now a matronly assistant to the pampered Mansfield — is quite delicious. A paean to glitzy shallowness, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? is deeper than it looks.
New and exclusive video introduction to the film by director Joe Dante
Vintage Movietone short which captures Jayne Mansfield on tour promoting the film
Alternate music & effects track with a different musical score for the opening of the picture and other 'temporary' effects-placement
Original theatrical trailer
Optional English SDH subtitles for the deaf and hearing-impaired.
Film Description
A classic Hollywood comedy, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? stars Tony Randall and Jayne Mansfield, produced and directed by Frank Tashlin, who also wrote the screenplay.
Tony Randall plays the low-rung writer of TV advertising, Rockwell P. Hunter, who gives his career a boost when he finds the perfect model for Stay-Put lipstick, the famous actress with the 'oh-so-kissable lips', Rita Marlowe (Jayne Mansfield). However, she wants something out of the deal too, with Rock having to act publicly as Rita's 'Loverdoll' to make her man jealous. When the news breaks, Rockwell Hunter suddenly finds himself famous across the country. But what about his fiancée?
In 2000, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being 'culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant'.
