What a neatly done job this is. Tony Randall is Rock Hunter, a minor functionary at a Madison Avenue advertising agency (this is a 1950s comedy and Mad Ave was the target of many jokes). He's about to be furloughed from his organization and then, by accident, manages to nail the outrageous Jayne Mansfield for her endorsement of the Stay-Put Lipstick account. Jayne doesn't care about the account but she wants to make her boyfriend back in Hollywood jealous so she pretends to be Randall's sex slave. An embarrassed Randall goes along with it. It all creates more ripples than Brittany Spears and Fed Ex or other couples of that ilk.

Pretty much everything works. The director, Frank Tashlin, knew his way around a comedy, having been responsible for a number of cartoons. He recognizes a good sight gag when he sees one. Watch the door open and the diminutive Tony Randall appear, back lighted, dressed in the over-sized suit of a muscle man, and wearing elevator shoes, staggering around like Frankenstein's monster.

He knows his hilarious dialog too. Randall is speaking to Mansfield's boyfriend, Bobo Branigansky, and pretending to be president of his ad agency. "Of course I'm the president -- but Miss Marlowe will be the TITULAR head of the company." Mansfield shrieks with delight, grabs Randall, and gives him an open-mouthed kiss, smothering half his face with her huge, blubbery lips. In a later scene, after having half his clothes ripped off by frenzied fans, Randall is offered a drink by the sympathetic Joan Blondell. Asked what he'd like, the morose Randall replies -- "I don't know. Make it something simple, a bottle and a straw." I don't want to give away any more of the gags, and the story isn't so convoluted that it hasn't already been limned in.

Let me add, though, that it's exceptionally well acted by everyone involved. Note, in particular, one long speech done in a single take with Henry Jones, as he explains to Tony Randall that success is nothing more than being in the right place at the right time. How dull it could have been. Yet Jones, with his passionate, dramatic, outrageous sing-song, makes it both gripping and extremely funny.

It's my understanding that the movie doesn't follow the play closely but I don't care. It has its own highly original touches. The movie is interrupted, for instance, by Randall who addresses the "TV fans in the audience" and demonstrates the failures of the luminescent orb in a way that makes us appreciate HDTV all the more. That scene couldn't have been in the play.

See it if you have the chance, even if you've seen it before. It's anodyne. It will chase the blues away.

"Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?" stars Tony Randall, Jayne Mansfield, Joan Blondell, Henry Jones, Betsy Drake, John Williams, and Mickey Hargitay in a dated but fun story that spoofs the advertising world and the movies' arch enemy, television. In fact, Tony Randall breaks the fourth wall for a "commercial" during one part of the film, extolling the virtues of that "big, 21-inch screen" as the little screen's picture has problems with its vertical.

The story concerns an ad exec trying to get a movie star to endorse a lipstick - in return, she wants him to pose as her new boyfriend.

The performances are uniformly wonderful - Randall is hilarious as a man trying to hold onto his job, and then onto his girlfriend. Joan Blondell is fabulous as Jayne Mansfield's assistant. She can't get over her milkman boyfriend, stating that loses it whenever she sees Half & Half.

But the movie belongs to Jayne Mansfield and her tongue in cheek sex bomb image - she's so blonde, so zaftig, so breathless, and so darn funny with her squeals of delight and outrageous wardrobe. When you look beyond all Jayne's muchness, you see a beautiful, smart woman who found a great niche for herself. It's a pity that the last part of her life was so sad. What a delightful, refreshing performer she was. This film and "The Girl Can't Help It" are for me her best, though she made several other films that showcased her comedic ability.

Very good movie, highly entertaining.

A fantastic satire of the modern world of business. Tony Randall stars as Rockwell Hunter, a writer for television advertisements. He's not really making it at his job, and is about to go under. By a couple of coincidences, he finds out where Hollywood starlette, Rita Marlowe (Jayne Mansfield),is hiding out in New York and thinks he can convince her to endorse a certain kind of lipstick. When Hunter arrives at Marlowe's apartment, she uses him to make her boyfriend, the star of a television Tarzan show, jealous. The boyfriend reveals Marlowe's secret love affair to the tabloids, and, in an instant, Rock has been reborn as "Loverboy" (no, not the '70s rock group),and the girls go wild over him. He's famous, and thus begins his meteoric rise to his company's presidency. But the further up he goes, the more he realizes that this was never what he wanted, despite what he once thought. The moral of the story is a bit pedestrian, but it's one that ought to be reinforced at times. It's also delivered in quite an original way. The film is full of the kind of innovations that the undervalued Frank Tashlin was so good at. Particularly memorable is the mid-movie dig at television. Television is a constant target in the film - it was presumably making the lives of many in Hollywood a bit miserable. At the halfway point of Rock Hunter, Tony Randall pops out from behind a curtain to address those in the audience who are more the type to watch television than go to the movies. "I wanted to interrupt the film you are watching so the T.V. people can feel at home."

The acting in the film is universally superb. I would never have imagined that Tony Randall could carry a movie, especially playing an everyman (I always think of him as a prissy, refined gentleman),but he does a great job. I saw Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It just last week. It also stars Jayne Mansfield, and I thought she was pretty bad. They tried to make her too sweet in that film. Here, she's more wicked, and thus a hundred times sexier. Mansfield is hilarious at times, especially with that little high-pitched squeal she does. It should get old, but it's very cute and always funny. When I was exiting the theater, there were a handful of women trying to duplicate the sound, unsuccessfully. The supporting cast is also wonderful, especially Henry Jones as Hunter's immediate boss.

The film does have a couple of problems. The script seems to forget about characters every once in a while. Although she seems important in the beginning, Rock's niece, April, basically drops off for most of the film. Likewise his fiancée (the one before Rita Marlowe appears, that is),Jenny. She comes back near the end, but her role is minimized quite a bit in the middle. Even Mansfield drops out near the end. The subplot which strictly involves her is resolved rather poorly, with a cameo appearance that should have carried more weight and really should have been funnier. All in all, though, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? is a great success. 9/10.