Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? is a 1957 American satiricalcomedy film starring Jayne Mansfield and Tony Randall, with Betsy Drake, Joan Blondell, John Williams, Henry Jones, Lili Gentle, and Mickey Hargitay, and with a cameo by Groucho Marx. The film is a satire on popular fan culture, Hollywood hype, and the advertising industry, which was making millions of dollars off the growing revenue from television ads. It also takes aim at television and the reduction it caused to the size of movie theater audiences in the 1950s. The film was also known as Oh! For a Man! in the United Kingdom. The film was produced and directed by Frank Tashlin, who also wrote the largely original screenplay, using little more than the title and the character of Rita Marlowe from the successful Broadway playWill Success Spoil Rock Hunter? by George Axelrod. The play had run from 1955 to 1956 and also starred Jayne Mansfield as Rita.
Plot
In lieu of a theme song and opening of the movie, Tashlin instead laid traditional opening credits over faux television commercials for products that failed to deliver what they promised. From this comedic segue, the film opens on a writer for television advertising, Rockwell P. Hunter, who is low on the ladder at the La Salle agency, the company where he works. With the agency set to lose its biggest account - Stay-Put Lipstick - he hatches an idea to get the perfect model and spokeswoman for Stay-Put's new line of lipstick, the famous actress with the "oh-so-kissable lips", Rita Marlowe. For Rita to endorse the lipstick, however, Rock has to pretend to be her boyfriend to make her real boyfriend, Bobo Branigansky, the star of a TV Tarzan show, jealous. Bobo leaks the news of Rita's new romance to the tabloids and Rock Hunter is suddenly famous as Marlowe's "Lover Doll". Hunter's boss decides to leverage his employee's newfound fame, but when Hunter also gets Marlowe to agree on a television spectacular sponsored by Stay-Put, Hunter becomes the advertising firm's highest-regarded employee. Marlowe, meanwhile, is miserable; she thinks she is falling in love with Hunter, but her one real true love is the man who discovered her, George Schmidlap. Not being able to find Schmidlap, she pursues Hunter, though her Secretary "Vi" warns her that she is playing a dangerous game.. Hunter soon finds fame to be a double-edged sword, getting him what he wants, but with a price to be paid for that success. Women are crazy about him, and he has no peace of mind. Ultimately, he moves up the ladder at work, becoming company president, only to find it is not what he really wanted. Hunter confesses to his angry fiancée Jenny that he finds himself at the top of the heap without any meaning and she takes him back. As Rita Marlowe opens her television spectacular for Stay-Put Lipstick, she is surprised by the appearance of the show's "surprise" guest star of, George Schmidlap. Freed from strain of advertising, Rock and Jenny retire to the country to tend a chicken farm, announcing that he has found the real living end.
Main cast
Actor
Role
Jayne Mansfield
Rita Marlowe
Tony Randall
Rockwell P. Hunter
Betsy Drake
Jenny Wells
Joan Blondell
Violet
John Williams
Irving La Salle Jr.
Henry Jones
Henry Rufus
Lili Gentle
April Hunter
Mickey Hargitay
Bobo Branigansky
Groucho Marx
George Schmidlap
Ann McCrea
Gladys
Barbara Eden
Miss Carstairs
Production
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? received a nomination for a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture Actor – Musical/Comedy and a nomination for the Writers Guild of America, East WGA Award for Best Written American Comedy. The character, Rita Marlowe, is based on dumb blond stereotype epitomized by roles performed by Marilyn Monroe at the time. The film contains joking references to several of Mansfield's other roles, including The Girl Can't Help It, Kiss Them for Me, and The Wayward Bus. The book Mansfield reads in the bathtub scene is Peyton Place by Grace Metalious, which became a feature film and a popular TV series that is claimed to be the forerunner of primetime soap operas. The buxom characters in the book were claimed to have been inspired by Mansfield. Former silent film starMinta Durfee has an uncredited role as a scrubwoman.
Legacy
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? is known as Mansfield's "signature film", and is in a package called "The Jayne Mansfield Collection" along with The Girl Can't Help It and The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw. In 1966 Frank Tashlin said it was the film of his with which he was "most satisfied... there was no compromise on that one. Buddy Adler let me do it my own way." 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".
Reception
Critical response
of The New York Times wrote in his review: "People who live in glass houses should not throw stones at their television sets, no matter how scornful and superior they may feel toward video. The rocks may miss the vexing targets and crash through their own fragile walls.This axiom is clearly demonstrated in the flimsy motion picture that has been made from the flimsy stage playWill Success Spoil Rock Hunter?". Ethan de Seife wrote in his book, Tashlinesque: The Hollywood Comedies of Frank Tashlin, that we see with Son of Paleface, Marry Me Again, Artists and Models, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, The Man from the Diners' Club, The Private Navy of Sergeant O'Farrell, and many others that American animation and American live-action comedy derive from the same tradition. Peter Lev wrote in his book, Twentieth Century-Fox: The Zanuck-Skouras Years, 1935–1965, "Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? is more fragmented than The Girl Can't Help It, and paradoxically it makes it a better film."
Release
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? was released on VHS on July 2, 1996 by 20th Century Studios.
