Most 20th Century Fox directors were not great visualists.....their only way to deal with Cinemascope was to stiffly pose their actors across the expanse of wide screen......as if positioning them like statuary across a proscenium stage.
But not Frank Tashlin, who ascended to film director after a career creating Warner Brothers cartoons........a master of visual gags, he'd turn his actors into live action animated comedians and enjoyed having fun at the expense of both Cinemascope and the dreaded enemy it was designed to thwart........television.
If you take out all the satirical pokes at TV advertising, the cult of celebrity and conformist corporate culture, "Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter" hammers some the same exact message as the previous year's "The Man In The Grey Flannel Suit."
Madison Avenue adman Rockwell Hunter (the quintessential Tony Randall role) ends up experiencing the same epiphany as the flannel-suited Madison Avenue adman Tom Rath (Gregory Peck).......the hell with climbing the corporate ladder, live the life you want to lead.......
In other words, nobody's tombstone reads "I wish I'd spent more time at the office...."
That simple concept still resonates today........and we much prefer the funnier, easier to digest Frank Tashlin version of it than the lengthy, lugubrious "Man In The Gray Flannel Suit.".....
Why? Let us count the ways........
Television Hollywood quaked at the encroachment of the little tube that people preferred to sit home and watch........so they unleash Tashlin to lampoon TV with no mercy.....the opening credits display a montage of idiot TV ads gone wrong.......and later on, Randall gives a striking visual tutorial on the stark difference between everybody's tiny black-and-white TV screens and glorious 20th Century Fox Scope and Color By DeLuxe......
Mindless celebrity worship Tashlin and Mansfield were way ahead of the curve here......long before 'Bye Bye Birdie' covered the same topic........Mansfield's cheerful but brainless movie star seems like a pre-cursor to Kim Kardashian.......commanding an adoring audience of mostly teen girls......(it's lucky for her character Rita Marlow there's no Twitter yet, or else she'd be brutally trolled for mistaking big words for sexual profanity....)
Put all of this stuff together and you've got sparkling, witty time capsule of 1950's pop culture foibles.....and as you can can guess.....one of our classic faves. 4 funny stars (****)......and it even throws in a funny cameo by Mansfield's husband (and father of Mariska) Mickey Hargitay
No comments:
Post a Comment