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The director who augmented Jayne

At the Siskel Film Center (Chicago), a look at the unsettling films of Frank
Tashlin

By Michael Phillips
Tribune movie critic

July 2, 2006

"Frank Tashlin, a fantasist who came out of animation without ever leaving
it behind entirely, once said, "There's nothing in the world to me that's
funnier than big breasts."

You might call it the opinion of a boy-man who grew up just in time for the
1950s. Thanks to the models rolling off the assembly lines of Detroit and
Hollywood, the decade was nothing if not aerodynamic.

So how can the director who fetishized Jayne Mansfield, the Marilyn Monroe
of Venus, beyond all human recognition in "The Girl Can't Help It" and "Will
Success Spoil Rock Hunter?" also claim the title of the movies'
indispensable social satirist of the Eisenhower era?

Well, have you seen those films lately? They are remarkable and unsettling,
reveling in every kind of psychosexual anxiety. "Imagine the Creator as a
low comedian," said H.L. Mencken, "and at once the world becomes
explicable." A similarly jaundiced American commentator, Tashlin -- who, at
his peak, was "just" a Hollywood gag man in the same way Hitchcock was
"only" into visual gimmicks -- imagined that world, in all its garishness,
on screen.

Newly struck 35 mm prints of "The Girl Can't Help It" (1956) and the
trenchant Madison Avenue spoof "Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?" (1957)
shine like tailfins of exquisite vulgarity in the retrospective "Thoroughly
Modern Tashlin: The Comedies and Cartoons of Frank Tashlin." The 13-feature
affair, just opened at the Gene Siskel Film Center, continues through Aug.
2.

Assembled by Martin Rubin, associate director of programming for the Siskel,
the retrospective features five Jerry Lewis pictures, two from the tail end
of the Martin and Lewis era, three post-Martin. If you're not a Lewis
aficionado, don't worry. There's more, and in addition to the live-action
features, on July 29 and Aug. 1 the Siskel will screen a program of
Tashlin's sterling animated work, produced before and during World War II.

Tashlin made his best and strangest pictures between 1952 and 1957, within
the Hollywood studio system. They were products, several based on Broadway
stage plays. Tashlin designed them for men in gray flannel suits and their
wives looking for something larger and wilder than they could get at home in
front of the television.

Many of his films obsess over the threat and evil allure of that rival
medium, as much as they satirize the commercials and rabid consumerism that
pay for it. On stately CinemaScope and VistaVision canvases saturated with
retina-splitting DeLuxe and Technicolor paint, Tashlin fought back against
American crassness. He typically fought fire with fire. If you want to
understand the 1950s and what people were popping pills, drinking heavily
and nervous-breakdowning about, you have to get to know Tashlin. He was our
postwar cinematic wizard of id.

A tense upbringing

Born Francis Fredrick von Taschlein in Weehawken, N.J., in 1913, the future
filmmaker grew up in a tense household, the only child of a French mother
and German father. He took to drawing early, contributing cartoons and
illustrations to his school yearbooks. By 13 he left school. In 1929 he went
to work as an errand boy for Max and Dave Fleischer's animation company.

During the Depression, Tashlin developed as a cartoonist, contributing under
the nickname "Tish Tash" to many of the humor magazines of the day: Bushwa,
Haywire, Bunk, Captain Billy's Whiz Bang. In 1933, at age 20, he was offered
a Hollywood job by Leon Schlesinger as an animator for "Looney Toons" and
"Merrie Melodies." Tashlin followed that with various assignments, including
gag man for Hal Roach Studios; a return to Schlesinger; two years for Walt
Disney as a story and joke man; a stint at Columbia Screen Gems animation;
and a final, fruitful run with Schlesinger.

During the 1940s, living with the first of three wives and a young daughter,
Tashlin focused on screenwriting. Having worked on the script for the Bob
Hope vehicle "The Paleface" (1948), he experienced a pang of regret upon
seeing the completed picture. It wasn't directed to his liking; too many of
the visual and verbal jokes got lost.

Tashlin made up for the stodginess of the first "Paleface" when he got the
nod to direct "Son of Paleface" (1952), which is part of the Siskel
retrospective and remains one of the most buoyant comedies Hope (and Jane
Russell, and Roy Rogers, and Trigger) ever made. While paying comically
lascivious attention to Russell, Tashlin created physics-defying sight
gags -- as when smoke shoots out from Hope's ears -- and slapstick of a
peculiarly destructive bent.

In "The Girl Can't Help It," Tom Ewell, a year after "The Seven-Year Itch,"
plays an alcoholic press agent building up gangster Edmund O'Brien's moll,
played by Mansfield, into a star. Doesn't matter how; doesn't matter what
she can do, or can't. As Little Richard sings in the title tune, she's got a
lot of what they call The Most. And in America, The Most is enough.

Tragic ugliness

The newly struck widescreen print of this sociological artifact is dazzling,
but it's a unique sort of dazzling. Director Peter Bogdanovich, a friend and
early champion of Tashlin's, considered Tashlin's rock 'n' roll success
fable "almost tragic in its purposeful ugliness." J. Hoberman of the Village
Voice called it "supremely unfunny," and he meant it as a compliment.

This is the secret ingredient of Tashlin's output: His most outlandish
conceits work one way for some people while working an entirely different
way for others. The acrid taste of his comedies, particularly those that can
be defined as sex comedies, can't be dismissed. Often there is a bold,
deliberate quality to a Tashlin gag sequence that becomes somewhat eerie.

The visual double-entendres hit you like a two-by-four. When Mansfield
clutches a pair of milk bottles to her bosom in "The Girl Can't Help It,"
you're seeing something so crass, yet so horribly right, it's boggling. It
boggles still, a half-century later -- this is the very image of '50s breast
fetishism, simultaneously embracing and mocking a copy (Mansfield) of a pop
icon (Marilyn Monroe) who never seemed real to begin with. Adding to the
weirdness, Mansfield is a drag-queeny creation of precisely the same
anatomical proportions as Hatta Mari, the dishy, proto-Jessica Rabbit Nazi
spy from Tashlin's World War II-era short "Plane Daffy."

Tashlin's Martin and Lewis pictures carry unexpected layers as well. The
acrimony between the stars is part of their fabric. In the exuberant
"Artists and Models" (1955), Dean plays a struggling painter who delves into
the lurid world of gore comics. Jerry plays his comic-book maniac of a
roommate, while Shirley MacLaine and Dorothy Malone play the women upstairs.
"We've been together too long," Dean says to Jerry at one point, and he
means it.

The other Martin and Lewis picture in the Siskel retrospective is the team's
farewell, "Hollywood or Bust" (1956). By then the stars were barely speaking
to each other, and Tashlin's road picture, almost abstract in terms of
plotting, scoots along on Jerry's lust for Anita Ekberg combined with
Jerry's antics with his pet Great Dane.

Paying homage

Influential French critics, particularly Jean-Luc Godard, loved Tashlin and
later, behind the camera, paid homage in their own way. (Along with his
sense of color, Tashlin's sense of cutting had its astonishments; the
transitions in a Tashlin film often plunk viewers down in the middle of a
scene so that they can't quite orient themselves.) Around the same time,
after his uneven work with a solo Jerry Lewis, Tashlin's career went south.
The era of free love made it harder for poets of hysterical repression to
express themselves. Tashlin's farewell was the Bob Hope/Phyllis Diller
vehicle "The Private Navy of Sgt. O'Farrell" (1968). The director died in
1972, leaving behind a wife, two ex-wives, a grown daughter and a young son.

The simplest thing to say about Tashlin is that his animation, especially
the Looney Toons and Merrie Melodies classics, dove headlong into some
stunning, cinematically "realistic" visions of the world. Later, his
live-action features were labeled "cartoony." Yet is that all they are? If
so, explain why "The Girl Can't Help It" and "Rock Hunter," his blaring
masterworks, keep calling to us. They come from a world unlike our own, yet
very much like our own. We still live in thrall to the imagery and
chrome-plated promises of advertising and the siren song of the American
success story. Anyway, it's unmistakable: That sound is really just Jayne
Mansfield, in high, profitable screech, imitating a siren in her hit single
"Rock Around the Rock Pile."

"Thoroughly Modern Tashlin: The Comedies and Cartoons of Frank Tashlin"
continues through Aug. 2 at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St. in
Chicago. Call 312-846-2800 or go to www.siskelfilmcenter.org for a complete
schedule.

- - -

If you can't see them all ...

"Son of Paleface" (1952), 6 p.m. Wednesday. Tashlin spoofs the western
genre, then in full resurgence, in a prime Bob Hope vehicle. Jane Russell
and her fishnet stockings also appear, along with Trigger, who at one point
shares a bed with Hope, which is more than Russell ever does.

"Hollywood or Bust" (1956), 3 p.m. Sunday and 6 p.m. Thursday. The final
Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis picture sends the team across the country in a shiny
new convertible, singing songs of the open road in between trading barbs
that make their imminent breakup touchingly apparent. Dean puts the smush on
Pat Crowley, while Jerry pines for Anita Ekberg.

"The Girl Can't Help It" (1956), 3 p.m. Saturday and 6 p.m. July 12. The new
print of Tashlin's profoundly ambivalent success fable, featuring Jayne
Mansfield and a host of mid-century rock 'n' roll acts great and small,
looks like a million bucks.

"Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?" (1957), 3 p.m. July 22 and 6 p.m. July 26.
Tashlin's masterpiece features Tony Randall's best performance, Jayne
Mansfield fully in on the joke -- i.e., Jayne Mansfield -- and some acute
zingers aimed at the advertising world and the Dale Carnegie success ethos.

"Frank Tashlin Cartoons" (1937-1945), 5 p.m. July 29 and 6 p.m. Aug. 1. The
director and writer's outrageous visual sense had to come from somewhere.
These golden age animated shorts show you where. The bill is worth seeing
for "Have You Got Any Castles" (1938) alone, wherein characters from a
library full of famous titles come to life and interact."

-- Michael Phillips