In what is considered to be his best film, Frank Tashlin (Artists and Models, Hollywood or Bust, The Girl Can't Help It) takes his usual idiosyncratic, gag-packed route to satire, leaving the world of illusion, people-packaging, audience consumerism - in a word, Hollywood - in tatters. Tashlin shifts the target of George Axelrod's 1955 Broadway play from movies to television and its mainstay, advertising, but the central focus - success through manipulation of the gullible - remains the same. Low rung ad man Rockwell Hunter (Tony Randall) is about to wave a reluctant goodbye to the lucrative Stay-Put Lipstick account (and thereby his job) when he hits on a campaign scheme involving film star Rita Marlowe (Jayne Mansfield), the girl with the oh-so-kissable lips. Success is more than even Rock Hunter had hoped for - and considerably more than he bargained for. At its height, he envisions Rita clothed in green bills as a chorus exalts, “You got it made.” However, in order to obtain Rita's endorsement, he has been called upon to impersonate not only the head of her sham corporation but her lover as well. And, image or no, he's still the schlemiel who can't seem to keep his pipe lit, and who can't but realize himself as an average guy (read consumer) whose own dubious success rests on the industry's aim “to please you and us and all the other us-es like us.”
Tashlin's formula for happiness is curiously similar to Hollywood's earliest endeavors at criticism/self-criticism: There's no success like no success. (JB)