Milwood Movie Night

Join us on Thursday, July 3 at 6 pm at Milwood Branch for a special screening of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter during our Texas themed screening series. 

The film stars Jayne Mansfield, who spent part of her childhood in Dallas, and then went on to study dramatics at the University of Texas at Austin in 1951. There, she joined the Curtain Club theatrical society on campus alongside future fellow Hollywood stars Rip Torn and Pat Hingle. Mansfield moved back to Dallas a couple of years later and studied with Baruch Lumet, the father of film director Sidney Lumet (12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, The Wiz), who was the founder of the Dallas Institute of Performing Arts. She moved to Los Angeles in 1954, but only managed to get bit parts at first. Then, after Mamie Van Doren rejected the role, she got the lead role of Rita Marlowe in the Broadway version of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter with Orson Bean and Walter Matthau. 

In 1956, Twentieth Century Fox signed Jayne Mansfield to a six-year contract in hopes of modeling her image and persona around the success of the increasingly unreliable Marilyn Monroe. Her first starring role in a Hollywood film was in The Girl Can't Help It, a satirical rock and roll and rhythm & blues comedy directed by former Looney Toons animator and frequent Jerry Lewis collaborator, Frank Tashlin.  After the film's success, Tashlin cast her in the film version of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter the following year. Mansfield played a cartoonishly flamboyant movie star in the film; the role was imbued with many meta-references to Mansfield's real-life persona, and Mansfield brilliantly embraced the opportunity for self-parody, taking back the polarizing idea the public had of her. She strategically played into the "dumb blonde" trope in media and publicity, but her IQ was reportedly somewhere between 149-163, placing her around the top 0.05% of the population, and she spoke French, Spanish, German, and Italian in addition to English. 

Jean-Luc Godard was a big admirer of Frank Tashlin, and the Cahiers Du Cinema magazine for which he wrote named Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter as the second-best film of 1957, below A King in New York by Charlie Chaplin and above Nights of Cabiria by Federico Fellini. 

Don't miss this film, which you will probably enjoy whether you view it as a silly fun piece of pure entertainment or a forgotten cinematic masterpiece!