Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?

An ambitious brash comedy, Frank Tashlin's 1957 Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? has almost too many satiric targets?  The film mocks Madison Avenue advertising culture -- it's a proto Mad Men critique of consumerism and its discontents without the melodrama in the TV series.  The fifties' fad for big-bosomed blonde sex bombs is both mocked and exploited in the reliably grotesque figure of Jayne Mansfield.   There are parodies of TV and radio pop-culture.  And the film manages a circumspect, but penetrating, indictment of masculinity as constructed by Eisenhower era society -- Tony Randall plays a hapless nebbish, a weak man and wannabe macher with infantile tendencies:  one of the film's many Freudian jokes is that Randall, who has no control over the women in his life, can't even figure out how to puff on a pipe.  Assuming that pipe-smoking represents an infantile oral fixation, a retrograde (or atavistic) sexuality consistent with the film's obsession with breasts, Randall's character, bearing the manly name of Rockwell Hunter, has even't achieved that level of erotic development.  In his later films, the somewhat saturnine Tony Randall played debonair, sophisticated, and worldly men -- in this picture, Randall is continuously aspiring to the masculine dimensions of his hard-ass name without every achieving those aspirations.  By the end of the film, he still hasn't figured-out how to successfully smoke his pipe -- "I can't get it lit," he wails, a sorrowful complaint in the world that equates smoking with sex.

The film's plot is complicated and has some of the flair of a Shakespearian romantic comedy -- after several erotic mésalliances and misunderstandings, the movie ends with three-matched pairs of lovers assuring the audience the love and happiness are indeed possible in the Capitalist purgatory that the film presents.  Rock Hunter is a low level ad man who's highest aspiration is anal -- he wants to shit in the locked executive toilet with its green-jade counter-tops. (When he is mistreated by management, he calls his boss a "poop.")  Instead, Hunter finds himself on the verge of being fired -- the advertising firm's largest client, Stay-Put lipstick, is disgruntled and about to cancel its contract.  Through some clever, if obvious, plot contrivances, Hunter is propelled into the presence of the peroxide-blonde sex bomb played by Jayne Mansfield.  Mansfield's character is upset with her lover, played by the ridiculously buff and handsome Micki Hartigay (Mansfield's husband in real life), a "jungle man" -- that is, the star of a Tarzan-styled TV show set in the jungles of Africa.  In order to make Bobo, the "jungle-man", jealous Mansfield pretends to be in love with Rock Hunter -- she squeals repeatedly at a pitch that must be a torment to bats and dogs and sighs voluptuously.  When he says that Jayne Mansfield will be the "titular" head of his company, she is thrilled by the word and, impulsively, kisses him.  In a reprise of the famous milk shot involving Phil Silvers in The Girl Can't Help It, the popcorn in his pocket ejaculates all over his suit and the floor.  Hunter negotiates with Mansfield's sex bomb to induce her to become a commercial endorser of Stay-Put lipstick, a stratagem that saves the advertising agency and, ultimately, results in Hunter being given the key to the executives-only toilet.  In the course of these negotiations, the blonde bombshell actually convinces herself that she is in love with the unprepossessing Hunter.  Of course, Hunter has a chaste, girl-Friday fiancée who is appalled by Hunter's apparently sexual relationship with the sex bomb -- her jealousy compels her to obsessively do push-ups to improve the musculature in her breast, while padding her bra and slinking around with the velvety "jello on springs" gait that Mansfield uses; the girlfriend even imitates Mansfield's ear-splitting ultra-sonic squeal.  Already a caricature, Mansfield's character is caricatured again by the girlfriend's malicious mockery.  The film posits a world in which everything is for sale -- Mansfield's sexuality is just a device to peddle products and the film interrupts itself time and again for overt, gaudy product placements:  TWA airlines gets a prominent placement and Mansfield's other projects, The Girl Can't Help It and The Wayward Bus, are relentlessly promoted.  The movie begins with a parade of grotesque advertisements -- radioactive dishwashing soap, a washing machine that turns out to be a man-eater, beer made from the finest "swamp water," a snap-crackle-pop cereal that will give you strength "when you stand in the unemployment line."  Clearly, all is not well in TV and movie consumer-land.  Randall breaks the fourth-wall for an intermission presented as a sop to the "TV fans" who like to have commercial breaks in their entertainment and the show ends with a nightmare parody of a late fifties TV variety show.  It's all brightly lit, completely and overtly visible, parody, at times slipping into surrealism -- in the film's climax, Rock Hunter wanders around the offices of the advertising agency, suddenly transfused with weirdly psychedelic lighting, and, ultimately, proclaims the film's credo, an odd variant on Henry Fonda's closing soliloquy in The Grapes of Wrath.  In Ford's iconic film, Tom Joad declared that he was a representative of the People and that their collective will would ultimately be invincible.  In Tashlin's no less iconic movie, Rock Hunter proclaims that he is just "an average guy (but nonetheless part of the great community of consumers):  "we are the great market, the consumers, the Nielsen family watching TV, the people who elect the President."  Having defined his every-day heroism as being a consumer, Randall abandons advertising, flees the blandishments of Jayne Mansfield, reverts to his pretty, if mousy, fiancée, and ends up raising chickens on a small farm.  The distance between the late 30's vision of collective man -- a heroic labor-organizing Communist -- and the late 50's protagonist, who defines himself proudly as nothing more than an "average guy" consumer --could not be more pronounced and, perhaps, more dispiriting.  And this melancholy implicit to the whole film, perhaps, explains some of its stranger elements.  Two odd themes predominate:  first, no one is doing what they want to do -- everyone has been forced into a role that they despise; this theme has Freudian implications since the movie suggests that overbearing fathers have some role in requiring their sons to succeed against their own better instincts -- the head of the advertising firm, for instance, only wants to breed and show roses but has followed his father into the disreputable family business.  The second odd theme in the film is the ancient notion that Eros is a mischievous and blind god -- Jayne Mansfield's love for the incompetent and childish Tony Randall is inexplicable, but, perhaps, the most realistic thing in the film.  (After all, after marrying Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn Monroe turned to Arthur Miller).  Joan Blondell who plays Mansfield's factotum and confidante has a long speech in which she describes her helpless love for a milk man -- milk and milkmen seem to be an obsessive leit motif in Tashlin's films.  Manfield herself admits she is searching for her first lover, the man who decisively shaped her erotic tastes -- at the end of the movie, we see him:  it's Groucho Marx, sneering and elderly and brandishing his phallic cigar. 

Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? began life as a Broadway comedy and it is sharply written.  A silent movie star fails in the talkies "because she didn't speak English.  She was from Texas."  When Hunter gets his longed-for promotion, his mentor says:  "At last you've outgrown your education."  Someone tells Rock Hunter that "success will fit you like a shroud."  There are several Hollywood "in" jokes:  Mansfield says that her next film project will be "a Russian movie about two brothers."  She is referring to her great rivals plan to produce a film of The Brothers Dostoevsky in which Marilyn Monroe planned to play Grushenka.