Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?

Dir. Frank Tashlin

Series - Hollywood Classics

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A meek copywriter (Tony Randall) finds himself rocketed up the corporate ladder after a chance encounter with a bosomy sex bomb (Jayne Mansfield) in Frank Tashlin's outrageous satire of 1950s American idols and ideals.

Mad Men times a thousand: Frank Tashlin's brash, brilliant cinema becomes ever more timely with its rendering of fifties America's vulgar culture of rampant consumerism, corporate ambition, and celebrity fixation. A widescreen skewering of all that and more, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? features Jayne Mansfield as a bosomy sex bomb being pursued by an advertising agency to endorse a new lipstick called "Stay-Put." Milquetoast copywriter Rockwell P. Hunter (Tony Randall), stuck on the lower rungs of his Madison Avenue ladder, has his chance to climb when Mansfield dubs him her "Lover Boy" in an attempt to make her current beau jealous. Will success spoil our meek adman, will Mansfield's legendary poitrine pop out of the widescreen frame, will America ever be the same after Tashlin has so gloriously trashed its ideals/idols? "Tashlin's best and least compromised film" (Peter Bogdanovich), Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? is a pop masterpiece, all the more delectable on the big screen for which it was made. "As Ernst Lubitsch was to the '30s and Preston Sturges to the '40s, so was Tashlin to the '50s: a filmmaker gifted with an uncanny insight into the ruling delusions of his day. Loud and beautifully vulgar in DeLuxe Color and CinemaScope, Rock Hunter is hilarious literally from the first frame" (Dave Kehr).