Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (20th Century-Fox, 1957)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, October 14) I watched a film on Turner Classic Movies that’s one of my all-time favorites: Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, a 1957 satiric near-masterpiece written, directed, and produced by Frank Tashlin and starring Tony Randall and Jayne Mansfield. Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? began life as a Broadway play by George Axelrod in 1955. It was a Faust-like story in which the leading man was George McCauley (Orson Bean), a fan-magazine writer who wins the assignment to interview movie sex goddess Rita Marlowe (Jayne Mansfield). Axelrod was inspired to write the play after Billy Wilder extensively rewrote his previous play The Seven-Year Itch to satisfy the dictates of the Hollywood Production Code, including changing a key plot point. In Axelrod’s play the hapless married man whose wife and kids have left him alone for the summer actually has sex with “The Girl Upstairs.” In Wilder’s film he doesn’t make it anywhere near the bedroom with her except in his outrageously funny fantasies. Axelrod clearly based the character of Rita Marlowe on Marilyn Monroe, who had starred in the film version of The Seven-Year Itch opposite Tom Ewell, who’d played the male lead on stage as well. Axelrod used his Hollywood experiences to create a farce about a man who literally sells his soul to the devil for success in the movie business. 20th Century-Fox bought the movie rights to Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? mainly to get Mansfield out of her run-of-the-play contract, and Tashlin threw out Axelrod’s whole plot, retaining only the character of Rita Marlowe.

Tashlin’s Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (Axelrod’s original title was Will Success Spoil Rock Hudson?, but the real Rock Hudson’s agent, Henry Willson, threatened to sue if Hudson’s name was used in the title) turned into a wicked satire of the advertising business and the whole American ideal of “success.” Tashlin also made Rock Hunter an integral character and, indeed, the male lead. His full name is Rockwell P. Hunter and he’s played by Tony Randall as a sort of quivering mass of exasperation. Hunter is a low-level executive for an advertising agency run by Irving LaSalle, Jr. (the marvelously droll British actor John Williams, who’d played a similar role in Richard Quine’s 1956 film The Solid Gold Cadillac, a similar but less acerbit satire of capitalism). Hunter and his immediate supervisor, Henry Rufus (Henry Jones), are worried that if the LaSalle agency loses its biggest account, Stay-Put Lipstick, the agency could go out of business and everyone associated with it would be out of a job. Rufus, who is so flustered at the prospect of immediate unemployment he admits he’s “drinking my lunch,” and Hunter brainstorm ideas for a campaign that will keep the Stay-Put account. Hunter is raising his teenage niece April (Lili Gentle) as a single parent and he’s also engaged to his secretary, Jenny Wells (Betsy Drake). April is the president of one of Rita Marlowe’s fan clubs and Hunter, finding his niece’s wall plastered with photos of Rita, figures that if he can get Rita Marlowe, billed in the ads for her movies as “The Girl with the Oh-So-Kissable Lips,” to endorse Stay-Put Lipstick, he’ll be able to save the agency and his job.

Meanwhile, Rita has just left Hollywood for New York to form her own production company and to study serious acting (two years after the real Marilyn Monroe had done just that). Rita runs into Rock and makes a pass at him, ostensibly just to make her boyfriend, muscleman Bobo Branigansky (Mickey Hargitay, Mansfield’s real-life husband at the time and father of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit star Mariska Hargitay), jealous. Only Rita is so astonished by Rock’s kiss that she immediately proclaims him her “Lover Boy” and plans to dump Bobo for Rock for real. The news of Rita’s unlikely new flame makes all the world’s newspapers except the New York Times, and Rock literally finds himself being mobbed on the streets by teenage girl fans who rip his suit to shreds to grab for souvenirs. LaSalle and Rufus insist that Rock continue his relationship with Rita in order to get her signature on the Stay-Put Lipstick endorsement contract – only there is no relationship. Jenny understandably gets jealous and beans both Rock and Rufus (the latter by mistake) with her potted plants. The agency plots to produce a TV special featuring Rita Marlowe introducing her endorsement of Stay-Put Lipstick – in one of Tashlin’s cleverer spoofs of both television and advertising, they announce at the beginning of the show that there will be no commercials, but they build the Stay-Put plugs into the show itself wherever they can – and the success of the project propels Rock first into a vice-presidency and the much-prized key to the executive washroom (three years before Axelrod’s nemesis, Billy Wilder, made that a key plot point of The Apartment!), and then into the presidency of the agency after LaSalle decides to quit his job and spend the rest of his working life breeding roses. In fact, all the leading characters make a 1960’s-style retreat from the pressures of success and fame: Rock and Jenny get married and start a chicken farm, LaSalle becomes a successful rose grower, and Rita ends up with the boy back home she never fell out of love with, George Schmidlap – played by Groucho Marx, 24 years after he and his brothers had made one of the greatest satires of all time, Duck Soup.

Groucho, who by then had made his comeback hosting the TV quiz show You Bet Your Life, turns to the camera (as he did so often in the Marx Brothers’ films) and says he’s glad at last to be on a TV show that isn’t burdened by commercials – only then he turns his back to the camera and we see a “Stay-Put Lipstick” neon sign strapped across his back. Tashlin studs the film with plenty of bizarre sequences, including an opening credit showing Tony Randall playing bass as part of an on-screen band supposedly rendering the 20th Century-Fox fanfare and announcing the cast, then being unable to remember the film’s title. Once the movie starts, we see a grimly funny series of spoofs of TV commercials for various products, and in the middle of the movie Randall steps out of character and delivers a jeremiad about the defects of television. He points out that it only has a 21-inch screen (and that was considered unusually large then!), it’s all in black-and-white (though when Rita’s big special comes on the announcer says it will be in “contemptible color – oops, compatible color”), the horizontal and vertical parts of the image flip around (real-life problems people my age vividly remember from the days of over-the-air TV), and at one point we hear Tony Randall talking but all we see is his midsection until the camera pans up. The main thing I love about Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? is it’s one of many indications from books, plays, and films actually made in the 1950’s that the era was considerably less enamored of “success” than the propaganda of Right-wing politicians have made it out to be. Books like David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man, and C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite questioned not only the cult of “success” but the capitalist society that underlay it. In its depiction of the idiocy of fame and how quickly it is bestowed on people and then cruelly taken away again, as well as its cynical attitude towards consumer culture and the advertising industry that sells it to people, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? seems all too timely today!