Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?



The cult of personality and its impact on the average consumer is skewered in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, a wry and risqué comedy by writer-director Frank Tashlin and starring Jayne Mansfield, herself one of the most popular mass media idols of the 1950s.

Ambitious ad man Rockwell Hunter (Tony Randall) tries to use a sex symbol (Mansfield) to promote his product, and ends up being used as a pawn to make her boyfriend jealous. How the film made it past the censors is something of a mystery, and even a half-century after it was made, it comes across as fresh and daring as it did in the 1950s.

Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? was added to the National Film Registry in 2000.


 * Getting Crap Past the Radar: So many of Tony Randall's lines.