WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER? begins with the familiar Fox logo and opening music, but with a twist: Tony Randall stands in the lower-left corner of the screen, playing along with the music. After the flourish, Randall takes center stage and introduces the movie, setting a flippantly po-mo tone that HUNTER manages to maintain throughout its running time.
HUNTER has such a simple and durable premise that 'Bewitched' worked it for eight seasons: an adman fears losing his job unless he can land that big contract. In this case, Tony Randall plays the leading nebbish and Jayne Mansfield plays the poor man's Monroe who holds the keys to his success. The jokes come nonstop, and some of them actually manage to be funny.
HUNTER depends on the audience's acceptance of Mansfield as some kind of feminine ideal. I find her to be phenomenally annoying, and her greatest talent appears to be her ability to get upstaged by every player around her, including her dog. That's not all bad, and even works when she's delightfully upstaged in the finale. Nevertheless, this movie feels tissue-paper thin. Of course, that can work in a comedy, and WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER? rocked along in its reasonably amusing groove right through to the end. I chuckled a few times, laughed out loud at the climax, and generally felt like I got my money's worth.
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