Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?

Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?
July 29, 1957
Fox
Comedy
DVD
C+

While Tashlin is even more satiric here than in The Girl Can't Help It, I don't find this movie as funny, or overall as enjoyable.  Yes, the main problem is that there isn't anything to compare to the music of GCHI.  But also, I felt like it is a period piece that has not aged well, and it's more interesting to think about than to watch.  For instance, the view of celebrity culture, with Jayne Mansfield, as Rita Marlowe, playing a self-parody (including her real-life future husband Mickey Hargitay as her onscreen boyfriend), and Tony Randall's character of Rock Hunter basically becoming famous for his supposed love life.  This feels both quaint and prescient, in that celebrity culture is much bigger than it was then.  Also, Tashlin, as in GCHI, both parodies and salutes the '50s mammary obsession, this time with Rock's girlfriend having a nervous collapse after trying breast-expanding exercises.  Her doctor recommends falsies, which is better than him suggesting plastic surgery, but a long way from him telling her to be happy as she is.  Rock, to his credit, loves her as she is.  Randall is actually very sweet at times in this movie, although "success" does turn his head for awhile.

Something else to ponder is that, while the double entendres aren't too surprising for Tashlin (including an expansion of his milkman fetish), I was startled by a perhaps unintentional lesbian subtext, as seen particularly with the characters of Rock's niece April and Rita's assistant played by Joan Blondell.  April's fan-worship of Rita is similar to "Phoebe's" in All About Eve (without the dishonesty), and she has pictures of Rita all over her bedroom.  (It gets stranger when she starts putting up pictures of her uncle.)  Blondell, despite her milkman crush and romance with Henry Jones (much more animated than in GCHI), has some moments that suggest she's served female stars as more than just a companion.

Of course, the definition of "success," at the height of the "gray flannel suit" days, is something that the movie grapples with, successfully or not.  I just don't think that it makes for as good a time at the movies (or on a 21-inch screen at home) as its predecessor.

John Williams was Sabrina's father in the Audrey Hepburn movie.  Ann McCrea was in Singin' in the Rain and The Band Wagon.  Fred Catania was in GCHI and would be in John Goldfarb, Please Come Home!  Oddly enough, Blondell would play Vi in Grease, perhaps a reference to her character of Violet here.