This is evidently one of Tashlin’s more avant-garde films, without a doubt the most political, and consequently the least understood. From George Axelrod’s Broadway play Tashlin kept the title, Jayne Mansfield, the advertising world and little else, whilst mounting a weighted, all-round assault against the very ethics of success. The results, striking from an artistic point of view, were disastrous for Tashlin’s career. […] No other CinemaScope film from the fifties is so preoccupied by the spectre of television. Advertising makes an appearance from the opening titles, during an interval in the middle of the film aimed at the cold turkey telephages presented by Randall (whilst the screen shrinks and turns to black and white) and in an absurd dramatic climax in which Groucho Marx unexpectedly pops up revealing himself to be Rita Marlowe’s lost love. But as soon as the smoke fades, the hero, having in the meantime become the president of his advertising agency, has returned to the tranquillity of daily life raising chickens on a farm.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, in Frank Tashlin, edited by Roger Garcia and Bernard Eisenschitz, Crisnée 1994