Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? Reviews

Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? is every bit as darkly satirical, cartoonish, loopy, and entertaining as the previous pairing between director Frank Tashlin and star Jayne Mansfield, The Girl Can’t Help It. This one may actually be better. Once more, Frank Tashlin gets an actual performance out of Jayne Mansfield, a 1950s sex goddess who seemed stitched together from various materials to make an iconic blonde bombshell but was somehow missing that central spark that made Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard, or Marilyn Monroe so endearing.

Mostly tasked to goof on the “dumb blonde” persona which she designed herself as, and eventually led to her painting her image into a corner, Mansfield seems to be having a grand time poking holes at the conceit. When tasked to bring out the actual woman behind the giggly top-heavy blonde goddess she excels. There’s a fragility and battle-scarred soul beneath that helium voice and wiggly body. Her penchant for squealing a lot or trying to talk while inhaling does grate on the nerves since she overdoes these mannerisms, but more often than not, she creates a very vivid portrait of a movie star trapped within the confines of her own self-created myth. And her commitment to that myth is quite extraordinary, from the change in voice and demeanor to the poodle that has dyed fur to match her various outfits throughout the film. More roles like this might have made me warm up to her more.

The plot itself pivots on her publicity stunts to make her TV Tarzan beau jealous. That her real-life paramour Mickey Hargitay plays the TV muscle man is an amusing enough bit that only adds to the meta-commentary of Mansfield and her role. On top of that is the plot revolving around Tony Randall, as advertising man Rockwell Hunter that Mansfield ropes into her publicity schemes. If he plays along with her, she’ll turn around and pay him back by starring in his lipstick ad campaign. That Randall, a nobody on his way to mediocrity at his job, becomes uber-famous for just being photographed with the beautiful star isn’t a shock, or even much of a satire.

It’s once his stock at the company starts to rise just by being around her without having accomplished anything that the darkly comic stuff starts happening. Just by keeping the advertising company in the news, however peripherally, he continually is promoted up the corporate ladder, and the executive bathroom keys become some kind of bourgeois status symbol. However, perhaps the most jaundiced and bluntest of satirical fun is had during the opening credits in which television ads are parodied, culminating in a washing machine getting into a tug-of-war with a spokeswoman.

Or maybe it’s the numerous scenes in which Tashlin once again pokes fun at the 1950s obsession with breasts, television, and what success means in America. Mansfield’s presence upends Hunter’s life, obviously, but it also sends his long-time fiancée into an emotional tailspin. Believing that his publicity stunt romance with Mansfield is real, Betsy Drake spends a significant amount of time trying to expand her bust, culminating in a scene in which she wears a padded bra, a tight sweater, and squeals like a dolphin around Randall’s office as a flirtation tactic to win him back.

Even more acid is thrown upon television during an intermission in which the nature and quality of it is compared less favorably to a movie theater. Randall breaks the fourth wall, speaks with the audience, shrinks the screen, loses the color, and talks up the greatness of television. Tashlin’s out for blood in this sequence, made during the height of Hollywood’s paranoia about television over-taking them as the dominant cultural force. Some of the satire may be blunted for a modern audience, but it’s still a very funny conceptual bit of satirical comedy.

Tashlin’s view of success in advertising, hell in America based on this and The Girl Can’t Help It, is suspicious to the point of maniac glee. A climatic scene in which Randall has managed to luck his way into becoming the president of his advertising firm is a glorious convergence of color, acting, and comedy. He stares at his name at the top of the firm’s doors, and they begin to sparkle in various colors. Randall then sees Mansfield dressed in a skimpy bikini covered with bills and coins, giggling and wiggling all over his office. His erotic glee is palpable, and he salivates harder over his business and professional luck than the half-naked pin-up he hallucinates in front of him.

Much of this makes Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? like a heartless, pitch black satire, but the film has a beating, bruised heart in the form of Joan Blondell. Blondell offers up the movie’s lone moment of naked, vulnerable emotional honesty. Normally, Blondell was hired by studios to be the sarcastic, blowsy, tough-talking sidekick dame to the more conventional lead, and she does a similar thing here as Mansfield’s assistant. But in a scene in which Mansfield and Blondell have a heart-to-heart about why Mansfield keeps choosing the wrong men, purposefully remaking ordinary guys into stars in a similar manner to how a svengali took Mansfield from obscurity to star, Blondell shares a story about a milkman who broke her heart. Amid the various scenarios that equate success with knowingly, or unknowingly but willingly, prostituting yourself in some way, this scene smacks you in the face. It’s brief, but it proves that these characters deserve a happy ending for all they’ve had to endure, and when they get it, they’ve earned through hellfire and heartbreak.

But Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? always works best whenever it focuses in on Mansfield. Tashlin took her and made her into the cartoonish post-modern vulgar icon of 1950s materialism and breast obsession. No other director was quite so sympathetic to her or knew how to highlight her gifts. Together they created an anarchic sex kitten that was much happier being a sweet, nice girl, and it’s a pity that no other vehicle could be made to expand upon this unique spin on the dumb blonde persona. At least these two films endure.