Word: itches
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...SUNKEN GARDEN, by Douglass Wallop (254 pp.; Norton; $3.50), spins this sudsy question in the novelistic washer: Will the seven-year itch spoil the successful marriage of Tom Forester, boy adman? Author Wallop is noted for his 1954 crystal-gazing novel, The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant (later the hit musical Damn Yankees), in which he showed how the Devil, with an assist from a Washington Senator outfielder, could raise hob in a baseball stadium; now he shows how the devil in the flesh complicates family life in the Madison Avenue...
Among the occupational temptations that befall diplomats is the desire to keep up appearances after it becomes impossible to keep up negotiations. Despite this itch to preserve a fictitious continuity, at certain moments in history pretense halts, and a cold finality can be plainly seen. Last week such a moment came...
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (by George Axelrod) is a satiric free-for-all on Hollywood and sex by the author of The Seven Year Itch. There is a blonde, Marilyn-Monroeish siren, a bland Hollywood agent with satanic powers, an illiterate Hollywood producer, an idling playwright who wrote a sock first play and can't get on with a second. And there is a shy, not very bright young fan-magazine writer who, by selling his soul in 10% slices to the agent, becomes a modern-day Faust...
There is an entertaining idea in uniting a 20th-century Faust with 20th Century-Fox. And Will Success, at its best, produces fresher, funnier and coarser lines than anything in The Seven Year Itch. Playwright Axelrod offers sex on the rocks and Hollywood in the raw, coaxes a few new laughs out of agents and Oscars, contrives short vaudevilles on such Hollywood problems as how to treat Boy-Meets-Girl stories. Jayne Mansfield makes an amusing siren and Martin Gabel a particularly skillful agent...
...unfortunate opening for parody offered by the above title is, in this case, unavoidable. Success seems indeed to have spoiled George Axelrod. In his second play, the author of The Seven Year Itch has scraped together a group of stock Hollywood characters, armed them with the feeblest of gags, and had the presumption to try to foist the result on the public as a humorous and slightly meaningful commentary on modern success. The result is not only meaningless, but unfunny...