Will Hollywood Spoil Another George Axelrod Play?

The short is answer is "yes," of course they spoiled it. George Axelrod's first hit Broadway play was heavily rewritten in adaptation to film in the era of the Hays Code, that is the 1955 Billy Wilder production starring Marilyn Monroe, "The Seven Year Itch." So, he wrote another play about the Faustian bargains with Hollywood that ruin writers, "Will Success Spoil Rock Hudson?" The name of Hollywood star Rock Hudson being slightly camouflaged after lawsuit threats and even though there isn't a Rock Hudson/Hunter in the play, him being merely referenced as the actor the fan-magazine writer first interviewed (remade as the Tarzan muscle man Bobo in the film, presumably partly a joke on slugger Joe DiMaggio). The real target was Hollywood and by way of Monroe, who it seems would become a reoccurring object of Axelrod's imagination, as he also went on to adapt Truman Capote's novella Monroe manqué "Breakfast at TIffany's," as well as having adapted the screenplay for Monroe's "Bus Stop" (1956). Anyways, when he sold his soul, or at least his play, again, this one railing against adaptations being ruined by the studio system, 20th Century Fox predictably threw out everything except for the Monroe part, as played on stage and screen by MM knockoff Jayne Mansfield.

The results are disingenuous, garish, and vulgar, and I'm bemused some apparently find it funny. All the humor is either too broad or sexist against broads. Don't do push-ups, ladies, you'll only hurt yourselves; just marry an average guy instead. It's even been selected for National Film Registry preservation by the U.S. Library of Congress as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant," although, to be fair, I suppose the second and maybe the first cases are true. This is lousy satire, though. Hollywood took a play critical of Hollywood and turned it into an anti-television joke at a time when the studios were desperately afraid of the boob tube--as presented in color and Cinemascope! The basic suggestion being that the real workers behind TV, that is the ad men, should all quit and become contentedly-average movie-goers, or something.

Toothless stuff, but OK, whatever. The Monroe burlesque, however, is just mean-spirited. This is a film from a studio resentful that they had to pay Monroe a fraction of what she earned them and a bit of power for her to do thusly, and so Mansfield is inserted to make a supposed joke out of a dumb blonde wanting to form her own production company, walking out on a perfectly fine bit-player $500/week contract as her starring roles raked in tens of millions of dollars for the studio. The film almost gets at something with Monroe/Rita Marlowe being the brains behind her own publicity, her own commodification, but there's no distinction made otherwise between the bimbo portrayal on screen and off, and the picture spends most of its time on the dubious comedic talents of Tony Randall, who apparently specialized in vanilla masculine insecurity. He'd later drag down a film of the real McCoy, Monroe's "Let's Make Love" (1960). No wonder the notoriously-insecure Monroe apparently snubbed the photo-bombing Mansfield at a 1955 New York party, Mansfield already established as Rita Marlowe on stage, or that Sophia Loren would later be captured giving the buxom Mansfield a sideways glance.

Too bad, too, because the premise wasn't without potential. During Monroe's walkout, Mansfield was hired by Fox in the hopes of promoting her as their new blonde bombshell in Monroe's image. She also appeared in "Playboy" magazine like her archetype. And, Mansfield does the dumb blonde parody well. My ear-drums goodness that squeal. She even studied at the Actors Studio like Monroe, as well as having studied acting at college. Clever, too, how her prior films such as "The Girl Can't Help It" (1956) are integrated into this one, and how other women begin imitating Mansfield, who in turn is doing Monroe. But, Fox and company were ultimately pretty inept concerning Monroe's more nuanced appeal beyond a tape measure and a breathy cadence putting out double entendres. Hence, their repeated firing and rehiring of her at ever greater cost to them and until it finally killed her. The Hollywood studio as the ad agency in the film, desk jockey suits whining about their dumb luck of success while making a mockery of the women they employ as sex objects (the romance here even being over the marriage of a boss and his secretary) and, perhaps even worse, making a mockery of the young women, the teenyboppers, who are their fans.