Frank Tashlin Article

[Damien]

From the New York Times, in conjunction with the Tashlin retrospective coming up at Film Forum in NYC:

UNMANLY MEN MEET WOMANLY WOMEN: FRANK TASHLIN; SATIRES STILL RING TRUE

By DAVE KEHR
Published: August 20, 2006

IN the mid-1950’s America witnessed a great explosion in popular culture, fueled by new prosperity and new technologies. And with that explosion — television, comic books, long-playing records and widescreen movies — was born an extraordinary generation of satirists. Their targets were not the traditional ones of sex, politics or the foibles of the fashionable, but the forms and clichéd content of entertainment itself.

Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding on the radio, Ernie Kovacs on television, Stan Freberg on records, Harvey Kurtzman in the early issues of Mad: all of those pioneering humorists and many others realized that the real world mattered less to people than the sea of sounds and images that the ever more powerful mass media were pumping into American lives.

In Hollywood the greatest practitioner of the new school of satirical comedy was Frank Tashlin, a filmmaker of Swiftian gifts whose movies will be shown at Film Forum in Manhattan over the next two weeks. The retrospective begins on Friday with a weeklong run of one of his most wildly entertaining films, “The Girl Can’t Help It” (1956), starring Jayne Mansfield, in a new 35-millimeter print, then continues Sept. 1 to 7 with eight more features and a program of shorts.

Tashlin’s work is as loud and colorful and happily discontinuous as the subjects he took for his films: the early days of rock ’n’ roll in “The Girl Can’t Help It”; Madison Avenue and the convergence of sex, celebrity and consumerism in “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” (1957); convertibles with tail fins and starlets with nose cones in “Hollywood or Bust” (1956); comic book artists and comic book readers in “Artists and Models” (1955); and that quintessential American man-child, Jerry Lewis, whom Tashlin guided through his early solo career in films like “It’$ Only Money” (1962) and “The Disorderly Orderly” (1964), showing as a double feature on Sept. 7.

Tashlin joyfully implicated himself in the raucous spectacle of his films. He was the first director to film rock ’n’ roll with the energy and flair it demanded (among the performers in “The Girl Can’t Help It” are Fats Domino, Little Richard, Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran), and his love of comics was long and real. He began drawing comic strips for his junior high newspaper in Astoria, Queens, in 1927, and after graduation found a job running errands for Max and Dave Fleischer, the makers of the “Betty Boop” and “Popeye” cartoons, at their studio in Times Square. He worked his way up, becoming an animator at the Fleischers’ uptown rival, the Van Beuren Studios, while selling one-panel cartoons to humor magazines.

In 1933 Tashlin moved to Los Angeles, where the producer Leon Schlesinger put him to work at Warner Brothers on the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series. By the early 40’s Tashlin was one of Warner’s top cartoon directors and contributed to the war effort with the “Private Snafu” cartoons made (relatively free from censorship) for servicemen. (Film Forum will present a program of Tashlin’s cartoons, organized by the animation historian Greg Ford, on Sept. 6.)

Tashlin took all of his cartoon experience with him when he moved into feature filmmaking, working first as a gagman and screenwriter for the Marx Brothers, Red Skelton and Bob Hope. He became a director when Hope had him shoot (without credit) an important sequence for “The Lemon Drop Kid” (1951). His first signed feature was a 1952 Robert Cummings comedy appropriately titled “The First Time”; that same year Hope had him back to direct “Son of Paleface,” a Technicolor extravaganza (also in a new 35-millimeter print) that marked the first full flowering of Tashlin’s style.

Like cartoon characters, Tashlin’s heroes have powers beyond those of merely mortal movie stars. They are able to stop the action and address the audience directly. (“Wait a minute,” Hope exclaims in “Son of Paleface” as his runaway wagon continues to roll on three wheels. “This is impossible.”)

They are even able to step out of the film itself. (Tony Randall appears in one corner of the Fox logo at the very beginning of “Rock Hunter,” vigorously performing the Fox fanfare on a trumpet, snare drum and bass.) Frames are organized with an artist’s eye, with colors carefully coordinated to give even the most banal setting a bounce of stylish abstraction, and sequences are edited with an animator’s absolute control over movement and rhythm.

A magnificent scene in “Bachelor Flat” (1962) follows a tiny dachshund as she tries to drag a gigantic dinosaur bone across the Santa Monica beach; scored to a lively passage of Latin jazz, it is one of the most dynamic studies in montage this side of Sergei Eisenstein. Jayne Mansfield became a living cartoon of nuclear-powered 50’s femininity in “The Girl Can’t Help It” and “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?”; Jerry Lewis was her polar opposite, a frightened kid trembling on the edge of a hormonal explosion.

In “Artists and Models” Mr. Lewis plays a gawky adolescent whose erotic imagination is fixated on a comic book figure called Bat Lady, but when he meets the flesh-and-blood woman (Shirley MacLaine) who models for the character, she seems as infantile and asexual as he does.

A satirist is necessarily a moralist, and for all of the fun Tashlin had with the exaggerated imagery of American pop culture, he insisted on the importance of rejecting the illusions of consumerism for the reality of human emotion.

More than most of his contemporaries, Tashlin was attuned to the ways in which our own desire betrays us and how easily it can be manipulated to sell things, like the Stay-Put Lipstick (“for those oh-so-kissable lips”) of “Rock Hunter.” The most absurd figure in Tashlin’s films is not the heavy-bosomed blonde but the pathetic male in a pure, helpless state of arousal, continually provoked by the eroticized environment that surrounds him.

Frank Tashlin died in 1972, but the world he satirized 50 years ago is still with us, in some ways more than ever.