The New Pictures

Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (20th Century-Fox) easily slides home as the year's most hilarious movie. It will vastly amuse, if not stupefy, all who adore or detest television and the institution of advertising. Bearing virtually no kinship to George Axelrod's play of the same name, this Success, a happy direct descendant of custard-pie slapstick, is one of the silliest strings of sight-and-sound gags ever to jounce through the sober inhibitions of staid latter-day Hollywood. Producer-Director-Writer Frank Tashlin, a onetime Disney cartoonist and sketching fabulist (The Bear That Wasn't), plays the yarn strictly for laughs.

From the moment it unveils its mock-hero, Rock Hunter (Tony Randall), ensconced side-screen as a one-man band in a spoof of the awe-struck music that always accompanies the searchlights introducing a Fox movie, Success is obviously in merry contempt of all that is sacred. The ensuing titles compete hopelessly with a series of TV commercials, totally irrelevant, but so distractingly zany that nobody will pay the least attention to the screen credits. Success roars onward, steadily more outrageous, shamelessly promoting forthcoming Fox movies (Peyton Place, Kiss Them for Me) and donating scads of free ad space to Trans World Airlines. This seems very obnoxious until it grows clear that Tashlin is shrewdly snickering at TV's own annoying tradition of the gratuitous plug ("Yessiree, made it to this here studio on time again today--good old Minute Minder watches . . .").

Tashlin's story is a fable of Madison Avenue: Rock Hunter's success in making Stay-Put Lipstick, his ad agency's biggest account, stay put. Hunter's own dream of success: to rise from his untouchable caste as TV commercial writer to possession of his own jewel-encrusted key to the executives' washroom. This glorious consummation (duly sanctified by a heavenly choir on the sound track) is realized through Rita Marlowe (Jayne Mansfield), a squealing movie siren noted for her "oh-so-kissable lips" and her favorite boast ("All my lovers and I are just friends!"). In getting Jayne's product endorsement in the bag, Rock is nearly bagged by her, almost sandbagged by his fiancee (Betsy Drake), almost pulverized by Jayne's tree-swinging steady frame (Biceps Boy Mickey Hargitay). As "the biggest thing since chlorophyll," Hunter is soon glorified as the agency's president. He is assured by his predecessor (John Williams): "Success will fit you like a shroud!"

Success has a universal touch that an army of market researchers could not improve on. Its humor dashes unpuffing from varnished vulgarity (Jayne is the "titular head" of a fictitious film outfit) to national institutions (Groucho Marx materializes as Jayne's first love). Actress Mansfield, a comic genius whenever she plays Jayne Mansfield, slithers into the skintight role of Jayne Mansfield. If the fun bogs slightly and if some of the gags have family reunions in the end, Director Tashlin may be forgiven for too-muching his good thing. Hollywood has every right to try beating its rival's antennas with TV's own fallen torch.

Pickup Alley (Columbia) is a corpse-strewn trail blazed by Trevor Howard, a masterful international dope smuggler, for the guidance of Victor Mature, a dopey sleuth inexplicably praised by his Narcotics Division chief as "the best man we've got." To make himself even easier to follow, Howard drags along with him a red herring called Anita Ekberg. And he goes on a real Crook's Tour--from Manhattan to a kaleidoscopic blur of bars, boudoirs and bawdy hotels in London, Rome, Naples and Athens--all genuine-location stuff, reeled off at such a frenzied pace that it rouses longings for the good old days when movies were more leisurely and made in Hollywood.

Though Mature's delay in spotting Smuggler Howard is mildly excusable (until the last reel, he doesn't know what Howard looks like), his tunnel vision in losing Anita's high-heeled trail is like getting lost on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Teamed up with a big array of foreign flatfeet to perform his mission, Mature grandstands it like a one-man beachhead in dodging the stilettos of a murderous band of toughs who jump him in a sleazy Roman hotel. This Donnybrook provokes the most sensible twist of the entire plot: a Roman police captain, Mature's own colleague, orders him tossed into a cell in protective custody. The cop's undebatable reasoning: criminals are a much greater menace to Mature than he is to them. If only bungling Vic had been kept safe in the pokey, Villain Howard and his spectacular doxy Anita would doubtless have been brought to justice several reels sooner.

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