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 today 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.