O Grande Sucesso de Rock Hunter

Occasionally biting, sometimes off the mark with cornball sight gags, but solid for the most part. You can see Tashlin's cartoon background with some of the visual gags and sound/sight cues, but there's just a distance here that doesn't really work. Randall has no chemistry with his best girl and it's hard to buy that angle, but for a spoof movie, you can overlook stuff like that. Overall it's pretty funny, dated in parts for sure, but still watchable.

Actually, this film is a lot of fun - 50's style. But the best performance in the movie is the one by Joan Blondell as Mansfield's assistant. She has a monologue about a milkman that will leave you in tears of laughter. Don't ever forget Blondell. Mansfield is quite funny, too! She takes her fan club very seriously and that makes it all the funnier. And that poodle!!

All the references to Fox movies of the day are there, plus all the digs at TV. They even add a commercial - making it very small and in black and white, fuzzy and full of snow - something the kids these days have never heard of.

Tony Randall is a scream and the perfect icon of the 50's. What a pity no one ever did an in- depth biography of him - - the stories he could surely tell!!

The movie is a lot of fun, especially if you remember the 50's. Hey! It really was like this, kids!

Advertising man makes publicity deal with voluptuous Hollywood star.

Hilarious spoof of the mammary-worshipping 1950's. The innuendos fly fast and furious so keep an ear cocked. Sure, viewers see much racier material now on TV. Still, the dialog's clever, the visuals inventive, and the cast superb. Director Tashlin's satiric eye is penetrating and years ahead, as the 1960's-like ending suggests.

That spoof of TV advertising is especially funny and still timely. Keep in mind that the TV medium was still new and so was making fun of its life-blood commercials. I love it when the jalopy crumbles under the salesman's boastful pitch. Corporations were also growing, laying out a new yardstick for success. So, Hunter's ecstatic delight with a symbolic key-to-the-washroom is not far off. And, of course, there's Rita's (Mansfield) low-hanging sex appeal, doubly emblematic of the time.

But Mansfield's also an adept comedienne. Catch how well she spoofs her own role. And were there two more droll characters than Randall and the underrated Henry Jones. Their little tete-a-tete's fairly ooze with actors' delight. Good also to see that great brassy dame Joan Blondell pick up a payday. (Catch the rather humorous shot of her coming rump-first out of the sleeping berth, which seems Tashlin's style, even with minor details.) Looks like someone also threw her the big dramatic grieving scene, maybe out of respect for her veteran status.

Anyway, the movie's a delightful glimpse of that strait-jacketed decade's more vulnerable absurdities, and in Technicolor's brightest candy box colors. Arguably, it's Tashlin's best.

A fantastic satire of the modern world of business. Tony Randall stars as Rockwell Hunter, a writer for television advertisements. He's not really making it at his job, and is about to go under. By a couple of coincidences, he finds out where Hollywood starlette, Rita Marlowe (Jayne Mansfield), is hiding out in New York and thinks he can convince her to endorse a certain kind of lipstick. When Hunter arrives at Marlowe's apartment, she uses him to make her boyfriend, the star of a television Tarzan show, jealous. The boyfriend reveals Marlowe's secret love affair to the tabloids, and, in an instant, Rock has been reborn as "Loverboy" (no, not the '70s rock group), and the girls go wild over him. He's famous, and thus begins his meteoric rise to his company's presidency. But the further up he goes, the more he realizes that this was never what he wanted, despite what he once thought. The moral of the story is a bit pedestrian, but it's one that ought to be reinforced at times. It's also delivered in quite an original way. The film is full of the kind of innovations that the undervalued Frank Tashlin was so good at. Particularly memorable is the mid-movie dig at television. Television is a constant target in the film - it was presumably making the lives of many in Hollywood a bit miserable. At the halfway point of Rock Hunter, Tony Randall pops out from behind a curtain to address those in the audience who are more the type to watch television than go to the movies. "I wanted to interrupt the film you are watching so the T.V. people can feel at home."

The acting in the film is universally superb. I would never have imagined that Tony Randall could carry a movie, especially playing an everyman (I always think of him as a prissy, refined gentleman), but he does a great job. I saw Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It just last week. It also stars Jayne Mansfield, and I thought she was pretty bad. They tried to make her too sweet in that film. Here, she's more wicked, and thus a hundred times sexier. Mansfield is hilarious at times, especially with that little high-pitched squeal she does. It should get old, but it's very cute and always funny. When I was exiting the theater, there were a handful of women trying to duplicate the sound, unsuccessfully. The supporting cast is also wonderful, especially Henry Jones as Hunter's immediate boss.

The film does have a couple of problems. The script seems to forget about characters every once in a while. Although she seems important in the beginning, Rock's niece, April, basically drops off for most of the film. Likewise his fiancée (the one before Rita Marlowe appears, that is), Jenny. She comes back near the end, but her role is minimized quite a bit in the middle. Even Mansfield drops out near the end. The subplot which strictly involves her is resolved rather poorly, with a cameo appearance that should have carried more weight and really should have been funnier. All in all, though, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? is a great success. 9/10.

A lightweight comedy famous as Mansfield's next big film after 'The Girl Can't Help It'. This was again produced by Frank Tashlin and satirises Jayne's public persona: a busty star of little apparent talent who will do anything for publicity.

Here Jayne plays Rita Marlowe who teams with advertising exec Rock Hunter (Tony Randall) for mutual gain. The film seems wordy at times. It mixes send-ups of the Hollywood publicity machine, the climb up the corporate ladder, and the introduction of television though the anti-TV jokes seem dated.

But anyone watching will be watching for Jayne and she's great. All her too-brief scenes are funny and she plays well with Joan Blondell, who is excellent as Rita's wise companion-assistant. Other enjoyable performers in the cast are John Williams of Hitchcock's 'To Catch a Thief' and 'Dial 'M' For Murder', and Henry Jones, the supercilious coroner in 'Vertigo'.