Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957)

A year after The Girl Can’t Help It, director Frank Tashlin reunited with star Jayne Mansfield for another raucous live-action cartoon. While that movie satirized the music industry and emerging genre of rock and roll, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? turns its sights towards advertising and the then-new medium of television. With all due respect to Little Richard’s excellent theme song and rollicking performances in the previous film, the large number of musical acts took up too much of the runtime for my tastes. That is no longer the case here, resulting in 90 minutes packed with even more character comedy and gags that I absolutely loved.

The film once again opens with a playful fourth-wall breaking introduction from the male lead (Tony Randall). From there we go into a series of parody commercials of questionable products that would have felt perfectly at home in the Looney Tunes cartoons Tashlin worked on earlier in his career. My favorite line was the washing machine commercial that started with a woman saying “If you’re like me, with six dirty children and a big, filthy husband…” Randall plays Rock Hunter, a man with a great name and not much else struggling at his advertising firm. Rock’s amusingly soused boss (Henry Jones in a possibly gay-coded performance?) reveals the firm is also struggling, and accurately points out that as useless mid-level management he will easily find another job but the “talented” people like Rock will be on the street.

Rock comes up with an idea to keep their biggest client Stay-Put Lipstick by getting an endorsement deal with beautiful actress Rita Marlowe (Mansfield) and her famous lips. She is spending time “in seclusion” in New York City, and by coincidence Rock’s niece April is a fan/dedicated stalker who knows where Rita is staying. April sneaks out to wait for Rita’s arrival at the airport, leaps a barrier to get close to her, and has pictures of Rita all over her walls in behavior that I usually associate with teen girl heartthrobs (like boy bands and WB actors for my generation).

I guess if the character had been a teen boy it would have complicated the plot by him being openly horny for Rita also, but my wife and I just decided that April was into Rita anyway. Also a little odd that Rock lives with his teenage niece, but his fiancee has to live in another apartment until he can afford a place for them together. I don’t know whether it makes the situation more or less weird that April looks more like a post-grad adult than a teenager. The actress Lili Gentle WAS actually around 16 or 17 when the film was made, but I swear everyone before 1960 who is not a small child looked 10 years older than they would today.

totally normal teen girl living with her uncle

Rock shows up at Rita’s hotel unannounced, at that exact moment she needs a man (any man) to provide a voice over the phone. Rita is trying to incite jealousy in her TV actor boyfriend, Bobo Branigansky (Mansfield’s real-life husband Mickey Hargitay), and all of a sudden she and Rock have a fake relationship going on. Intentionally silly names are always a comedic gamble but Bobo made me smile every time, and I was also amused that he is billed as the star of the “first adult ape show” as the Jungle Man. Things get more complicated when Bobo mentions the “affair” in a TV interview and all of a sudden the papers are talking about Rita’s “Lover Boy” Rock Hunter. She agrees to work with Rock’s advertising firm if he helps publicly maintain the lie. This leads to plenty of shenanigans and misunderstandings, and the increasing frustration of Rock’s fiance. Rock moves up the corporate ladder as his personal relationships are taxed.

Mansfield squeaks and coos her way through a sexy and silly performance, Rita mistaking everything for innuendo. Despite her daffiness, Rita is a more dynamic character than Jerri in The Girl Can’t Help It. She still just wants love, but she is hurt enough from the past to seek substitutes and savvy enough to manipulate her media image. She also gets an assistant/confidante to bounce off of, brassy older broad Vi (played by Joan Blondell, who had been a sex symbol starlet herself in the 1930s). Hunter/Randall is another improvement over the previous film, with the character giving a wider range to play with. He gets to play sad sack and dumbfounded, but he has occasional outbreaks of extreme confidence or competence. Randall also delivers some great physical comedy. First he struggles to climb a fence as he runs from a crazed crowd. They tear up his clothes, so has to put on a hilariously oversized suit (one of Bobo’s) along with lift shoes. It's a real fashion forward moment:

David Byrne saw this, and all of a sudden fashion Started Making Sense

Ron DeSantis took style and posture lessons from this scene

Tashlin also continues to toss in the occasional meta reference or bit. There is a gag about someone being a “courageous youngster” for going to see The Girl Can’t Help It (which in this world stars Rita Marlowe) a second time. There is an intermission gag riffing on tv ad breaks. Mansfield’s hotness once again breaks the laws of physics around her. Overall this film is packed with silly and/or clever lines and moments, and felt like a funnier, fuller movie than its predecessor. I am glad there are more Tashlin movies for me to watch, but I am sad there are no more collaborations with Mansfield to enjoy. Her over-the-top sexiness in both appearance and performance is the perfect compliment to Tashlin’s horny cartoon sensibility.