Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?
| Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? | |
|---|---|
|
|
| Directed by | Frank Tashlin |
| Produced by | Frank Tashlin |
| Written by |
George Axelrod Frank Tashlin |
| Starring |
Jayne Mansfield Tony Randall |
| Music by | Cyril J. Mockridge |
| Cinematography | Joseph MacDonald |
| Edited by | Hugh S. Fowler |
| Distributed by | 20th Century Fox |
|
Release date
|
July 29, 1957 |
|
Running time
|
93 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $1,050,000 |
| Box office | $4,900,000 |
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? is a 1957 American satirical comedy film starring Jayne Mansfield and Tony Randall, with Betsy Drake, Joan Blondell, John Williams, Henry Jones, Lili Gentle, and Mickey Hargitay, and a cameo by Groucho Marx. The film is a satire on popular fan culture, Hollywood hype, and the ad industry, which was making millions of dollars off the growing revenue from television ads. It also takes aim at television and the damage it was doing to movie attendance 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 play Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? by George Axelrod. The play had run from 1955 to 1956 and also starred Jayne Mansfield as Rita.
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 (Tony Randall), 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 (Jayne Mansfield).
For Rita to endorse the lipstick, however, Rock has to pretend to be her boyfriend to make her real boyfriend, Bobo Branigansky (Hargitay), 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 (Groucho Marx). Not being able to find Schmidlap, she pursues Hunter, though her Secretary "Vi" (Joan Blondell) warns her that she is playing a dangerous game. (Ironically, Blondell, who plays Mansfield's frumpy, middle-aged, all-business secretary, was herself a major movie sex symbol some 30 years before, and whose sexuality was one of the first victims of the Hays Code).
...
Wikipedia