DVD of the Week: Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?

Few credit sequences launch a movie with as inventive a comic high as that of Frank Tashlin’s 1957 film “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?,” which I discuss in the clip above. (One predecessor that comes to mind is Howard Hawks’s “Monkey Business.”) It stars Tony Randall as an advertising copywriter (and, in the opening sequence, as Tony Randall) and Jayne Mansfield as the starlet whose endorsement he seeks for a brand of lipstick. I’ve always thought that Randall had the misfortune of being born too soon (in 1920)—that, had he been of the sixties generation of actors, such as Dustin Hoffman, or of the seventies, such as Richard Dreyfuss, he’d have been one of Hollywood’s leading male verbal intellectuals in an age when such performers were often stars rather than second bananas. This movie suggests the note of ironic self-consciousness that he’d have brought to that virtual competition with Woody Allen; I’d like to have seen the movies in which Randall performed, even directed, his own scripts.

P.S. The film will play on June 25th at 7:30 P.M. at 92Y Tribeca, co-presented by Alt Screen, and it’s currently available on Time Warner video-on-demand.