Two cheery, even hilarious works that are informed by a surrealist spirit are showing this week at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Each says plenty about what’s wrong with the world, yet neither has a villain.
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Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, showing in a sparkling new archival CinemaScope print, is a wild avant-garde satire of Western culture circa 1957 by writer-director Frank Tashlin. Very freely adapting a George Axelrod play, he focuses on ephemera in New York—advertising, television, celebrity culture, 50s breast worship. He also uses his background in Hollywood animation, molding his stars—Tony Randall and Jayne Mansfield, both giving their best performances—into cartoons. Randall’s a nerdy Madison Avenue executive with rolling eyeballs, Mansfield’s a tall, squeaking, Betty Boop-ish movie star with cleavage.
Tashlin had a huge stylistic impact on the New Wave. Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, his greatest film, is the template for Godard’s bold use of primary colors and ‘Scope in the 60s. (When I first saw it in my early teens I was so exhilarated by its irreverence and invention I sat through it twice.) Artists and Models (1955), Tashlin’s second greatest movie, about the 50s craze for comic books—starring four more Tashlin cartoons, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Dorothy Malone, and Shirley MacLaine (and showing next week in the Film Center’s Tashlin series)—was the acknowledged inspiration for Jacques Rivette’s 1974 Celine and Julie Go Boating.
Were these references product placement? Tashlin’s admission of complicity with the culture he was lampooning? Probably some of both. The movie seems revolted by American notions of success, but when some of the major characters finally renounce these ideas to follow their unglamorous dreams the movie seems to mock them. We can’t quite believe that Randall’s ad executive becomes a chicken farmer, and neither can Tashlin or Randall. Maybe that’s why the characters turn up in front of a stage curtain at the end, becoming abstract Brechtian commentators on their own dilemmas.
Directed and written by Chris Marker
Narrated by Gerard Rinaldi
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? ★★★★
Directed and written by Frank Tashlin
With Tony Randall, Jayne Mansfield, Betsy Drake, Joan Blondell, John Williams, Henry Jones, and Mickey Hargitay
