Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter (1957, Frank Tashlin)
A mad farce of intelligence and considerable verve, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? demands to be considered at least in part a legitimately penetrating look—albeit an eye-popping and jolly one!—at an especially American brand of commercial zeal.
Rockwell P. Hunter (Tony Randall) is an ambitious and awfully bumbling advertising man low down on the ladder at a big New York firm that just so happens to be in big trouble if it cannot hold the Stay-Put Lipstick account. Famous movie goddess Rita Marlowe (Jayne Mansfield) happens to be back in town with her wisecracking personal assistant (Hollywood legend Joan Blondell). What is it that the public relations flacks have assured Rita Marlowe come to be known for? Why, the lips most kissable, naturally! Rock Hunter sets out to engineer himself a professional coup—in the manner of something not unlike a bull in a china shop. Legendary filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard was long an outspoken fan of director Frank Tashlin and this film particularly. In fact, Godard’s work with forceful primary colours in a number of his films of the 1960s is unthinkable without the influence of the former animator and gag man.
“America,” Ishmael Reed writes in his 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo, “is the tobacco auctioneer, the barker; Runyon, Lardner, W.W., the traveling salesman who can sell the Brooklyn Bridge every day, can put anything over on you and convince you that tomatoes grew at the South Pole.” Or consider the amusing self-aggrandizement of Leo Feldman, more hero than anti-hero in Stanley Elkin’s 1967 novel A Bad Man. “I am master of all I purvey.” It is a line that frames potency around things, their possession and the trading of them, and what Leo “purveys” are the things in his department store (things official and things otherwise). Damon Runyon, Ring Lardner, and Walt Whitman aside, if the special magic blarney that distinguishes American speech is largely sales patter and platitudes of commerce, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? happens to be perfectly historically situated to make pertinent note of how the accelerant of mass media figures in the hijacking, for starters, of a national language.
Tashlin’s films are always to an extent about communication and miscommunications, as well the kind of advertising commercial operations contract out, which should not be confused with the kind of advertising an unwitting person will tend to perform day to day without necessarily even being conscious of it. In the popular cinema of the 1950s, the television is increasingly a large and obdurate object in physical space, but it is this particular Tashlin film, with its metacinematic larks and unrepentant fourth-wall-breaking, which tasks Tony Randall’s Rock Hunter, a man insecure respective both of scale and stature, with directly extolling the magic(s) of CinemaScape and DeLuxe Colour at the audience, rating these attractions as he sensibly (and contractually) does well above that piddling cathode ray box…over which the camera subsequently lingers in mock disdain. While a no-account film crew cannot get into Rita Marlowe’s hotel suite half so easily as can a television set, the cinema’s recourse, to become bigger and better and ever more real than it already more really was, means the motion picture learns to bombard where the television set penetrates impassively. Be sure to note that Frank Tashlin was a sophisticated and sneaky person.
At a certain point in the viewing of it, it is no longer possible to doubt that Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? knows what it is up to, this largely business relating to the impotence declarations of potency always seems to announce as well as the ubiquity of easy lies wherever scruple would appear to be out of fashion. Tashlin’s is an ironically vulgar film about the intersection of a number of unscrupulous professions, the director’s own line of work unmistakably co-accused. One can project for a moment a personal Tashlin mindset (if I may take the liberty): the world is a joke, and if it is not yet that, surely a joke is as high as the world ought to aim, its having on all accounts a record of quite terrific misfire.
-Written by Jason Wierzba