“Of course, the great thing about television is that it lets you see events live as they happen, like old movies from thirty years ago.” — Rock Hunter
“I wanted to make a picture where I got a laugh faster than anyone else – I guess that’s where it started,” said director Frank Tashlin, explaining the opening sequence to Will Success Spoil Rock Hudson? to Peter Bogdanovich for Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors, the 1997 book. “Also, I hate credits,” said Tashlin. “Who wants to sit there and read all those names?”
Tashlin, who got his start making Looney Tunes shorts, never wavered from his cartoony comedy roots. His live-action films maintain the breakneck speed and wild exaggerations usually found in animation, shedding a harsh light on the emerging consumerism and throwaway culture. In Rock Hunter, his send-up of the world of advertising and the rat-race of the 1950s, Tashlin created perhaps his most biting satire of what he saw as the “nonsense of civilization.” Replicating the overstimulation of a culture that moves toward excessively vulgar images, even before the Twentieth Century logo appears at the beginning of the film, Tashlin’s comedy is at work.
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? is about an ad-man, Rockwell P. Hunter (Tony Randall), who needs a famous star, Rita Marlowe (Jayne Mansfield doing a thinly-veiled Marilyn Monroe parody),…
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