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The leading man plays the Fox fanfare as a one-man band, Godard in Pierrot le Fou recalls the procession of pitchmen in the opening titles ("Wow contains fallout, the exclusive patented ingredient..."). Out of Harvard and into Madison Avenue, the corporate scribe (Tony Randall) conjuring jingles for Stay-Put Lipstick, dreaming of the key to the executive toilet. Saving the account means securing an endorsement from a squealing superstar (Jayne Mansfield), who's jilting Bobo the Jungle Man in a break from Hollywood. ("If you wanted seclusion, I could've drained the swimming pool," snaps Joan Blondell as the assistant nostalgic for Los Angeles smog.) The spindly advertiser poses as her new Lover Doll and gets his suit torn by screaming fans, his fiancée (Betsy Drake) tries to match the bombshell and ends with paralyzed arms from bust-enhancing exercises. "Well, I'll be a writer's subplot!" Frank Tashlin's rollicking satire of the business of peddling images, a coruscating view of the cultural muckheap that includes his own The Girl Can't Help It. The hero can't quite keep his smoking pipe lit, his associate (Henry Jones) has cocktail olives for lunch and a psychiatrist for his teen daughter. ("The bills! That man must be building a monument for Freud.") Exploding popcorn and possessed typewriter, Louella Parsons the oracle and Groucho Marx the dreamboat, Tashlin in full swing. The nod to "the TV fans in our audience" shrinks the CinemaScope frame to deform Randall's face through a tiny, flickering black-and-white screen, though the most radical rupture may be the heartfelt Blondell monologue that suddenly reveals a person among the cartoons. "The art of being happy," ultimately as illusory as roses and chickens in the realm of artifice, "that's the way the poop poops." Osborne has The World of Paul Slickey in a couple of years, and Wilder The Apartment soon after. Cinematography by Joseph MacDonald. With John Williams, Lili Gentle, Mickey Hargitay, Ann McCrea, and Barbara Eden.
--- Fernando F. Croce |