I am murderously tired, but it is now officially spring at the end of this winter that didn't feel like one. Please enjoy this slice of sunlight like petrified wood. I found it in a cemetery.
Last night![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch and I watched Frank Tashlin's Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), which somehow neither of us had ever seen. I could produce a short disquisition on its exuberant and caustic cartoon of consumerism, or I could just tell you that Jayne Mansfield is capable of emitting a squeal that could stun a beluga and I have never before seen some of Tony Randall's facial expressions outside of a Muppet. The fourth wall breaks just about as often as the last nerve of the Production Code. Joan Blondell gets an emotional monologue and more than one contender for most casually outrageous line in the screenplay, like she brought the pre-Code era with her. Henry Jones plays a quintessential ad man, which means that he's selling something different in every scene, often the plot. It's very brightly colored, except when it's pandering to the TV fans. And it isn't mean-spirited, even though the premise of a grey flannel schlep required to play the role of boytoy to a super-stacked bombshell in order to close an agency-saving deal sounds like it should have trashed everyone—if Billy Wilder had written and directed, it probably would have. It helps that everyone is both more human and way weirder than their archetypes indicate, Mansfield's self-parodying platinum pneumaticity not excluded. It explodes everything, even its own cynicism, and turns the confetti-colored fallout into the next gag. You could double-feature it with The Apartment (1960) or Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). It is probably a masterpiece.
Last night
spatch and I watched Frank Tashlin's Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), which somehow neither of us had ever seen. I could produce a short disquisition on its exuberant and caustic cartoon of consumerism, or I could just tell you that Jayne Mansfield is capable of emitting a squeal that could stun a beluga and I have never before seen some of Tony Randall's facial expressions outside of a Muppet. The fourth wall breaks just about as often as the last nerve of the Production Code. Joan Blondell gets an emotional monologue and more than one contender for most casually outrageous line in the screenplay, like she brought the pre-Code era with her. Henry Jones plays a quintessential ad man, which means that he's selling something different in every scene, often the plot. It's very brightly colored, except when it's pandering to the TV fans. And it isn't mean-spirited, even though the premise of a grey flannel schlep required to play the role of boytoy to a super-stacked bombshell in order to close an agency-saving deal sounds like it should have trashed everyone—if Billy Wilder had written and directed, it probably would have. It helps that everyone is both more human and way weirder than their archetypes indicate, Mansfield's self-parodying platinum pneumaticity not excluded. It explodes everything, even its own cynicism, and turns the confetti-colored fallout into the next gag. You could double-feature it with The Apartment (1960) or Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). It is probably a masterpiece.
