One of our favorite oddball titles makes a glorious Blu-ray debut

Plus we wish someone special a very happy birthday

It’s Friday, January 14, and here’s where we are…

My parents are in their 80s now and they’re still rolling along, happy and healthy, so I want to kick off today’s newsletter by wishing my mother a very happy birthday.

So much of who I am as a filmgoer started with the twin influences of my parents, and they each had their own interests and their own approach to media. They both were readers, and they both had their favorites in terms of movies and movie stars. My mother was the one who turned me on to a greater breadth of movies, I would argue. My dad liked tough guys like Clint Eastwood and John Wayne and James Bond and Steve McQueen, and I watched plenty of those types of films with him. My mom, though… she liked comedies and melodramas and science-fiction movies and musicals. She loved movie stars and when video finally arrived, she would bring home the strangest, most eclectic stacks of things.

She was often my default movie buddy, and as I got old enough to start picking the films I wanted to see, she indulged me. I made plenty of mistakes in judgment, and I remember several films that we left early or that got turned off on the VCR. At one point, I talked her into taking me to see the 3D Western Comin’ At Ya! in the theater. This would have been in 1981, so I was 11 years old. To this day, I have no idea what triggered her, but we didn’t make it more than half-hour before we were up and on the move because of something that offended her profoundly, sending us into a screening of Arthur instead. For some reason, though, The Sword and the Sorcerer was not just okay, but a huge hit with her. There was no particular rhyme or reason to what she liked or what she disliked, but when she loved something, she taught me that it didn’t matter what was cool and what wasn’t as long as you loved it.

image courtesy of 20th Century Studios

There’s one film in particular that I think of when I think of my mother, and it’s a film that I pretty much never hear anyone talk about, but a film I adore. 1957’s Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? is a broad, cartoonish comedy, which makes sense because it was directed by Frank Tashlin, one of the brilliant minds behind the Looney Tunes animated films in the ’40’s. He was also a gag writer for all kinds of legendary comics like Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, and the Marx Brothers before he started directing live-action features in the early ‘50s. He made a whole string of Jerry Lewis films as well, but for my money, the two films that best capture the unhinged brilliance of Tashlin were The Girl Can’t Help It, a wicked satirical look at rock’n’roll just as the genre was getting its legs under it, and Rock Hunter, his second collaboration with Jayne Mansfield.