Spirited Vulgarity: Frank Tashlin as Comic Auteur.

Frank Krutnik[published in Studies in American Humor, 3 (27), 201-15, July 2013]

Review of Tashlinesque: the Hollywood Comedies of Frank Tashlin. Ethan

de Seife. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012.

Hardcover $35.00. 251pp

The publication of Ethan de Seife’s lively study of

Frank Tashlin provides an opportunity to reconsider the work

and legacy of one of the most inventive practitioners of

American screen comedy.1 Tashlin gained experience as a

director by working for several key animation studios

through the 1930s and early 1940s – including Disney,

Columbia’s Screen Gems and the Leon Schlesinger unit at

Warner Brothers, purveyors of the Looney Tunes and Merrie

Melodies gagfests. Despite personal friction between them,

Schlesinger hired Tashlin on three separate occasions,

clearly appreciating his contribution to the stylized comic

antics of Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny and company. As

de Seife shows through his admirably detailed analysis,

Tashlin brought a distinctive style to animated comedy, but

even at this early stage in his career he had ambitions to

break into live-action feature movies. As cartoon historian

Michael Barrier points out, Tashlin’s work for Warner

Brothers was distinguished by an unusually ‘cinematic’

approach to animation, as he packed his 7-minute short films

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“with cartoon equivalents for claustrophobic closeups, deep

focus, and oblique camera angles, in scenes that suggested

F.W. Murnau more than Walt Disney” (Barrier 1999, 335). In a

1971 interview, Tashlin admitted to Barrier that unlike his

fellow Warner’s directors Tex Avery and Friz Freleng, “When

I was doing cartoons, I was concerned with one thing: doing

motion pictures, features… I remember I did the first

montage they ever did in a cartoon. I was always trying to

do feature-type direction with these little animals”

(Barrier 2004).2 In between engagements at the cartoon

studios in the 1930s, Tashlin wrote material for comic

performers at the Hal Roach lot, contributing to films

featuring Laurel and Hardy, Charley Chase and Patsy Kelly.

From the mid 1940s, however, he dedicated himself to live-

action comedy. He worked as a gagman-for-hire on films

starring, among others, the Marx Brothers, Red Skelton,

Lucille Ball and Bob Hope. His valuable input into the Hope

vehicles Monsieur Beaucaire (1946) and The Paleface (1948), both

commercial hits, led to Tashlin being entrusted with

directing retakes on the comedian’s 1951 vehicle The Lemon

Drop Kid, which needed substantial reworking after a series

of disappointing previews. Although he only received screen

credit for his writing, Tashlin directed over a third of the

finished picture.3 The Lemon Drop Kid was a box-office success

and amply demonstrated Tashlin’s talent as a director of

live-action comedy. He would helm 22 films over the next 17

2

years - ending his Hollywood where he began, with Bob Hope

(in the disappointing and dated 1968 wartime farce The Private

Navy of Sgt. O’Farrell).

Serving frequently as both writer and director, and

sometimes as producer, Tashlin specialized exclusively in

comedy. While several of his films rely on narratively

articulated comic scenarios – especially the sexual comedies

Marry Me Again (1953), Susan Slept Here (1954) and The Lieutenant

Wore Skirts (1956) – half of Tashlin’s feature output is built

around comedians who were trained in the performance milieus

of US variety entertainment (vaudeville, burlesque, Borscht

Belt resort hotels, or nightclubs). After The Lemon Drop Kid,

for example, he made two further comedies with Bob Hope –

including the outlandish and inspired Western parody Son of

Paleface (1952), a superior sequel to the 1948 film - and 1Notes? Beyond his contributions to cinema, Tashlin also had extensive experience in print media. He supplied cartoons toa range of publications in the 1930s, including a regular strip (“Van Boring”) for the Los Angeles Times from 1934-6, andwrote several highly regarded animated children’s books. He also directed episodes for several television series in the 1950s. For a detailed account of Tashlin’s output across various media, see Prouty.2 Tashlin’s awareness of the comic potential of animals persisted in his live-action work, and he made imaginative use of Roy Rogers’ horse Trigger in Son of Paleface, of dogs inHollywood or Bust and Bachelor Flat (1962), and a magical rabbit in The Geisha Boy.3 For information about Tashlin’s role in the production of the film, initially directed by and credited to Sidney Lanfield, see Prouty 191, 212-3.

3

also steered Danny Kaye through one of his final star

vehicles, The Man from the Diners’ Club (1963). Tashlin’s most

sustained comic partnership, however, was with Jerry Lewis,

whom he directed in two of the final, and perhaps finest,

(Dean) Martin & Lewis screen vehicles, and then in six of

Lewis’s subsequent solo ventures. As de Seife suggests,

Lewis’s hugely contested status, as both comedian and

filmmaker, has tended to overshadow Tashlin’s critical

reputation. Their collaboration was clearly crucial to both

men, with Lewis frequently acknowledging the substantial

debt he owed Tashlin for his knowledge of both filmmaking

and filmic comedy (for example, see Bogdanovich 2005, 152,

162). In between the two Martin & Lewis films, Artists and

Models (1955) and Hollywood or Bust (1956), and the string of

Tashlin-Lewis collaborations from Rock-a-Bye Baby (1958) to The

Disorderly Orderly (1964), came the two Jayne Mansfield

showcases that de Seife and many others regard as his

masterworks. The Girl Can’t Help It (1956) and Will Success Spoil Rock

Hunter? (1957) are scabrous satires of the sexual economy of

1950s popular culture, exemplified respectively by rock-n-

roll and advertising. Centered on the absurdist, hyper-

pneumatic figure of Jayne Mansfield, a cartoon-like

exaggeration of the era’s obsession with what Marjorie Rosen

has termed ‘mammary madness’ (282-99), these films lampoon

the plastic preoccupations of postwar consumer society. As

several critics have recognized, Tashlin’s films reveal an

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ambivalent attitude towards this society. In 1968, for

example, Raymond Durgnat compared Tashlin to Andy Warhol

because the work of these two pop artists shared a “mixture

of despair and acquiescence” (233). Jonathan Rosenbaum 1994

assessment similarly identified Tashlin’s style as embodying

an equivocal approach to its subject matter, describing it

as “a deliberately dehumanized form of expressionism in the

cartoonlike demeanor of the major characters that had bitter

satirical overtones, loud primary colors that also suggested

cartoons and comic books, and a spirited vulgarity that

comprised a kind of bittersweet response to infantile

energies run amok” (23).

With Tashlinesque Ethan De Seife offers the first

scholarly monograph devoted to the filmmaker, although he

had earlier been the subject of two critical anthologies,

both titled Frank Tashlin – a 1973 collection by Claire

Johnston and Paul Willemen published by the Edinburgh Film

Festival in conjunction with the influential British theory

journal Screen, and an eclectic and enthusiastic collage of

materials put together in 1994 by Roger Garcia and Bernard

Eisenschitz to coincide with a Tashlin retrospective at

Locarno’s 47th International Film Festival. Long before

these works, and during his late 1950s heyday, Tashlin was

championed by critics of the influential French screen

journals Positif and Cahiers du Cinema, with the former dedicating

a special issue to the director in 1958. In Cahiers Jean Luc

5

Godard wrote celebratory appraisals of numerous comedies he

directed and even coined the adjective ‘Tashlinesque‘, which

de Seife borrows for his title (59).4 Even though Tashlin is

no stranger to critical aficionados of film comedy and

Hollywood cinema, de Seife’s extended and level-headed

scrutiny of his achievements and significance is long

overdue. Building on a recent wave of critical interest in

both screen comedy and cinema animation, he examines

Tashlin’s cinematic career from his early cartoon work

through to his final, faltering films of the 1960s.

Tashlinesque offers a deft combination of textual

analysis and historical research. Scrutinizing a large

number of films from all phases of his career, De Seife

teases out the distinctive features of Tashlin’s style via

detailed comparison of sequences from his movies and those

of other Hollywood directors who worked with the same comic

performers. These side-by-side comparisons provide genuinely

illuminating insights into the nuances of performance, gag

construction and mise-en-scène, and offer a convincing case

for the uniqueness of Tashlin’s work as a filmmaker. De

Seife also makes imaginative use of a range of archival

materials - including original scripts, studio memos, and

4 More recently, Denise Mann has explored Tashlin’s satirical self-referential comedies, along with those of Billy Wilder, as signature texts within the shifting industrial and cultural terrain of postwar US cinema, focusing especially on their (post)modernist mediation of television’s populist mass entertainment (87-120).

6

the files of Hollywood’s censorship agency, the Production

Code Administration – which do a good job in fleshing out

the broader institutional contexts within which the

filmmaker operated. Moreover, while drawing on an impressive

array of scholarly approaches to film comedy, this carefully

reasoned and judiciously illustrated study is written in a

lucid and engaging style that eschews jargon and makes the

films and gags come alive on the page – though the author’s

invocation of average shot lengths when analyzing the

cartoons may test the patience of more casual readers!

Tashlin’s approach to screen comedy was influenced not

by the European wit and sophistication of Ernst Lubitsch but

by the distinctively American tradition of popular humor

that was nurtured in the performer-centered realm of variety

entertainment.5 This vaudeville aesthetic, as Henry Jenkins

(1992) terms it, provides the common ancestor of the

Schlesinger unit’s gag-based cartoons, the slapstick comedy

of the silent era, and the films of subsequent comedians

such as Bob Hope, the Marx Brothers and Jerry Lewis. De

Seife robustly – if, at times, somewhat laboriously -

challenges the commonplace assumption that Tashlin simply

transferred his animation technique to live action films, or

that his live-action comedies are ‘cartoonlike’ (54). He

insists instead on a more complex understanding of the

relationship between these forms, identifying animation and 5 For further consideration of this tradition of popular humor, see Krutnik 2012.

7

live-action comedy as “two distinct but overlapping modes or

realms of filmic expression” (62). Tashlin may have been

exceptional as a director who made the transition from

animation to live-action comedy, but de Seife proposes

grouping him alongside such figures as Groucho Marx, Jack

Benny, Red Skelton, Ed Wynn, Bob Hope and Danny Kaye as a

comic artist who was steeped in a common heritage of popular

entertainment traditions. “Instead of arguing for the

cartooniness of his features or for the ‘cinematic’ nature

of his cartoons,” he suggests, “we may more usefully

consider Frank Tashlin as a vaudeville-influenced comic

artist who found success in multiple realms of artistic

expression” (62). For De Seife, Tashlin’s work “provides the

most extensive, compelling case study of the deep generic

connections between Hollywood animation and the American

comic tradition” (52).

It is the certainly the case that the experience of

working in animation equipped Tashlin with a distinctive

approach to comedy. De Seife argues that Tashlin’s

experience directing cartoons allowed him to develop key

skills in the mastery of mise-en-scène. The key difference

between animation and live-action filmmaking is that in the

former “even such tools as cinematography and editing become

subsumed within the domain of mise-en-scène: the arrangement

of elements in the frame. All camera movements are simulated

by changes within the mise-en-scène, not by the manipulation

8

of an actual camera” (53). Through working in animation

Tashlin cultivated a finely tuned sense of graphic design

and composition that would pay dividends when he turned his

hand to live-action cinema, as is demonstrated in particular

by the precision of his visual gags. Another significant

feature shared by the Warner Brothers cartoons and Tashlin’s

live-action comedy is the centrality of performance. This is

the case, for example, with Tashlin’s direction of Porky

Pig, which illustrates his skill in developing emotional

expressiveness (33-38). De Seife emphasizes how these

cartoons indicate Tashlin’s growing skill as a director of

‘performance’ – and he is quite right to follow animation

historian Don Crafton in proposing that cartoon character

can indeed act. As Crafton puts it, “in animation everything

is a performance. Everything we see on the screen has been

constructed to be a performance” (10).

De Seife devotes a substantial proportion of his study

to Tashlin’s animation work, and he does a very good job

analyzing both the techniques of gag construction and the

stylistic differences between Tashlin’s cartoons and those

of Termite Terrace colleagues such as Friz Freleng, Chuck

Jones, Tex Avery and Robert McKimson. His Warner Brothers

cartoons, for example, reveal a fondness for gags that

depend purely on visual design, and which tend to more

clever than funny (19). De Seife describes this technique,

which persisted through Tashlin’s live-action comedies, as

9

the “non-gag”, as it uses the same procedures as more

orthodox gagging but rather than soliciting laughter it is

designed to draw attention to technical virtuosity in

construction or design. Through close analysis of gags and

style in these animation shorts, De Seife reveals the early

development of Tashlin’s distinctive comic method, which

consists of “particular methods of staging, pacing, visual

humor, character-based humor, non-gags, self-reflexivity,

sexual humor, and satire” (51).

Like many other scholars of screen comedy, de Seife is

especially interested in the structural relations

established between gags and narrative. Performer-centred

comedy has always had a rather eccentric status in

mainstream cinema because the modular variety entertainment

that fed it differed substantially from the integrated

narrative model that Hollywood adopted as its norm.6 As de

Seife observes, the American studio cartoon was itself “one

of the great cinematic repositories of disconnected,

modular, near-narrativeless structure” (55). Several of

Tashlin’s animated shorts of the 1930s exhibit this

episodic, gag-centric structure, as do his live-action

comedies – and, indeed, comedian-centred films more

generally. But when he moves onto discussing the two

Mansfield films de Seife curiously argues for their

superiority because of the manner in which they integrate 6 For an influential formulation of Hollywood as a cinema ofnarrative, see Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson.

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gags and narrative. While agreeing that the Mansfield films

represent Tashlin at the top of his game, I am not convinced

that their aesthetic success derives from the integration of

gags and narrative. To me, The Girl Can’t Help It and Will Success Spoil

Rock Hunter both seem inherently, even joyously episodic.

These films may riff off a set of satirical concepts in a

focussed manner, but this process is by no means coordinated

through and by the structuring principles of orthodox

Hollywood narrative. De Seife seemingly feels the need to

make such a claim because it is much easier to sell the

aesthetic merits of narrative-based comedy than more modular

forms. A similar argument is traditionally proposed to

valorize the ‘mature’ 1920s feature films of Charlie

Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, who are seen to

transcend the lowly form of the gag-based slapstick short

with their move into ambitious feature-length films that

‘harmoniously’ coordinate gags within more carefully and

poignantly structured narratives.7 A second, and perhaps

more strategically important, reason why de Seife

prioritizes the narrative dimensions of Tashlin’s comic

artistry is that it provides him with a useful means of

disentangling his input from that of Jerry Lewis in their

long-running cinematic collaboration.

7 Steve Neale has challenged this conventional reading of the feature films of the silent clowns by identifying them as more unstable hybrids of gag-based comedy and Hollywood narrative protocols (Neale and Krutnik 96-131).

11

Recent years have seen a resurgence of critical

interest in Lewis as a performer, a filmmaker and a hotly

contested celebrity, as evidenced by Shawn Levy’s 1996

biography, my own 2001 monograph Inventing Jerry Lewis, Murray

Pomerance’s 2002 anthology Enfant Terrible, Chris Fujiwara’s

2009 study of Lewis as a cinematic stylist, a lengthy

interview in Peter Bogdanovich’s Who the Hell’s In it? (2005), and

Lewis’s 2005 memoir Dean & Me (A Love Story).8 While Lewis always

takes pains to credit Tashlin as his directorial mentor, the

latter’s reputation has not really benefited from the

attention accorded his former protégé – and de Seife clearly

feels a sense of mission in his attempt to redress the

balance. I do feel that he overstates his case in this

respect – although, admittedly, I have my own vested

interest in the debate. In a recent interview with Fujiwara,

Lewis distinguishes films such as Rock-a-Bye Baby (1958), to

which the two men contributed equally, from Cinderfella

(1960), which was more a Lewisian project, and films such as

Who’s Minding the Store? (1963) and The Disorderly Orderly (1964) in

which Tashlin was the main creative force (Fujiwara 2007,

105-7). By contrast, de Seife takes a more limited approach

to the question of collaborative authorship, ascribing

everything he regards as negative in the Tashlin-Lewis films

to Lewis alone. He argues that Rock-a-Bye Baby, Who’s Minding the

12

Story? and The Disorderly Orderly are all closer to the films Lewis

directed than to Tashlin’s work, asserting that Lewis’s

input serves to jam the transmission of Tashlin’s comic

specialties. As he sees it, these are schizophrenic films

that are torn between Lewis’s sentimentality and modularity

and Tashlin’s interests in bawdy humor and the gag-narrative

axis (152). As a director, de Seife comments, “Lewis pushed

to extremes the use of a modular, gag-based narrative”

(152). Instead of regarding this as a purely negative

attribute, one could flip the valuation around to suggest

that this approach liberated Lewis’s filmmaking from

fictional constraints and allowed him to explore other

formal and structural possibilities. Hence, his directorial

debut The Bellboy (1960) proudly declares itself “a series of

silly sequences”, while The Ladies Man (1961) and The Errand Boy

(1962) similarly exploit the possibilities offered by a

fixed location (a hotel, a boarding house for female

performers, a movie studio) to play out a set of loosely

related scenes. These highly idiosyncratic and imaginative

films questions orthodox understandings of comic practice

and comic response, with Lewis refining Tashlin’s use of the

non-gag and investing it with deconstructive purpose. De

Seife also casts Lewis’s upfront interest in sentiment as a

‘betrayal’ of Tashlin’s satiric comic outlook (151) – even

though, of course, the two impulses can co-exist quite

happily, as in Chaplin’s City Lights (1931) and The Great Dictator

13

(1940). These are pretty commonplace accusations in the

reception of Lewis’s work since the early 1960s, and it is a

shame to see de Seife buying into them so readily –

especially as recent critics have offered a more

sophisticated exploration of Lewis’s comic method in his

self-directed films (see, for example, Krutnik 1994,

Fujiwara, and Pomerance).

De Seife also chastises Lewis for diluting the sexual

humor he prizes as the most challenging feature of Tashlin’s

comedy (157, 162). Ribald humor features consistently across

the span of Tashlin’s career, although it was only given

full reign in his live-action work (63). For example, his

debut feature film, The First Time, includes a running gag that

plays on the sexual implications of bananas, with which the

pregnant heroine (Barbara Hale) develops a fixation (73-4),

while Susan Slept Here (1954) deals with the risqué

relationship between a middle-aged scriptwriter (Dick

Powell) and a teenage girl (Debbie Reynolds). The Mansfield

films explode with gags that exploit the star’s inflated

corporeal assets: as de Seife comments, “Tashlin often uses

Mansfield as an emblem of over-heated sexuality who

literally embodies his ambivalent approach to sex and

satire” (126). Mansfield’s extravagant voluptuousness may be

the target of satirical debunking but so, too, are the

8 Bogdanovich also republished his much earlier interview with Tashlin in a companion volume, Who the Devil Made It? (1997).

14

equally excessive responses it provokes from legions of

lust-impaired men. Thus, in The Girl Can’t Help It Tom Miller (Tom

Ewell) “is confused and astonished by Jerri’s [Mansfield’s]

body”, his speechlessness standing in “for the befuddlement

of the modern American male when he is confronted with self-

assured femininity” (126). Without denying the ambivalence

de Seife notes in such examples, Tashlin’s sexual humor

nonetheless subscribes – no matter how parodically – to a

relatively orthodox heterosexual agenda. Sexuality in these

films is codified in terms of alluring female bodies and

prurient male responses to them, which is consistent with

the dominant values of 1950s US culture. Indeed, the ribald

humor of Tashlin’s films is arguably part of a much broader

wave of sexual comedy trend within 1950s and 1960s Hollywood

comedy, as a large number of films offered a similarly

indulgent critique of post-Kinsey and post-Playboy sexual

mores - including Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch (1954) and

Kiss Me Stupid (1964), Lover Come Back (1961), Under the Yum Yum Tree

(1963), A Very Special Favor (1965) and Boeing Boeing (1965).

It is simply not the case, as de Seife asserts, that

Lewis jettisoned sex-oriented comedy after his split with

Dean Martin to pursue a wholesome star image that would

sustain him as a child-friendly box-office attraction (157).

Even a cursory glance at such Lewis-directed films as The

Ladies Man or The Nutty Professor (1963) attests to the centrality

of sexuality to his work, although he offers a far less

15

conformist understanding of sexuality than is found in

Tashlin’s films. Ed Sikov observes that Lewis served the

postwar USA as a “jester in a court of sexual panic... the

hysterical manifestation of his culture’s failed repressed –

imminent sexual criticism incarnate” (190). Even before

encountering Tashlin, Martin and Lewis films such as The

Caddy played “the sexual side of buddyism for dangerous

comic effect, turning a kind of vicarious homosexual panic

on the part of audiences into pleasure by way of nervous

laughter” (186-7). In his solo career, too, Lewis offered

continual slippages from the heteromasculine norms that

Tashlin simultaneously satirizes and gratifies. Joanna Rapf

argues, for example, that The Ladies Man delivers a critique of

patriarchal assumptions, identifying Lewis as an

“involuntary feminist” (198-200). In this film the woman-shy

Lewis figure Herbert H. Heebert enters a stylized world of

aspiring female performers, where he is allowed to shake off

the demands of patriarchal masculinity. In two memorable

scenes he is thrown into deconstructive encounters with

hyper-masculine tough guys, played respectively by Buddy

Lester and George Raft. He accidentally unravels Lester’s

immaculate clothing, in the process demolishing his

masculine certitude, as well as engaging in a beguiling

spotlit tango with movie hoodlum Raft, who plays himself.

Such scenes demonstrate that, rather than abandoning sexual

comedy, Lewis’s films aimed for a broader palette of sexual

16

options than the more circumscribed masculine orientation of

Tashlin’s work.

The reimagining of established protocols of gender and

sexuality in Lewis’s films is far more daring than anything

found in Tashlin’s work, no matter how intriguing the latter

may be on its own terms. De Seife’s blindness in this regard

seems a product of his self-appointed mission to rescue

Tashlin from Lewis’s shadow, and this does impair his

otherwise valuable study. One could even argue that the

sexual humor de Seife values so highly, and so

unquestioningly, may actually be one of the most significant

limitations of Tashlin’s comic art. Why is it, for example,

that the glamorous female star recurs as an embodiment of

the worst excesses of manufactured desire – in Hollywood or

Bust, The Geisha Boy (1958), Rock-a-Bye Baby, and the Mansfield

films? And does Agnes Moorehead’s boss-lady in Who’s Minding

the Store? need to be such a shrill and misogynist caricature

of female authority? Men are certainly ridiculed in these

films as well, but not to the same degree and not with the

same sense of purpose.

In raising such questions I do not wish to turn this

into a Lewis-vs.-Tashlin wrangle, but I was disappointed by

the way de Seife handles the relationship between these two

highly gifted comic practitioners. There are moments in the

study where de Seife’s reverential approach to his subject,

and his own ardent fandom, blocks a more level-headed

17

consideration of the bigger picture – and his attempt to

disentangle a ‘pure’ Tashlin text from the impurities of

Jerry Lewis is perhaps the most glaring example of this.

As Lewis’s directorial career flourished through the

1960s, Tashlin’s faltered. Films such as The Man from the Diner’s

Club, The Alphabet Murders (1965) and the two strained and

slapstick-heavy Doris Day spy farces The Glass Bottom Boat

(1966) and Caprice (1967) certainly have their Tashlinesque

moments, as de Seife is quick to point out (167), but they

lack the sureness of touch that animated the director’s

earlier work. De Seife struggles gamely to extract potential

from these late films but, perhaps inevitably, his

discussion proves anti-climactic, and he falls back on

checklisting traces of his favored authorial hallmarks

(satire, performance, ribald humor, diegetic rupture, sonic

humor, sight gags and non-gags) (169-173). The book is

rather tentative when it comes to identifying the causes of

Tashlin’s decline, although de Seife does point to the

presence of waning (Danny Kaye, Bob Hope) or unsuitable

(Doris Day) stars. It is a shame he does not broaden his

reach a little here, as it would be interesting to consider

the degree to which the ebbing of this once energetic comic

talent can be ascribed to broader cinematic or cultural

transformations. By the mid 1960s the vaudevillian culture

that had fostered the comic artistry of Tashlin, Hope, Kaye

and Lewis was outmoded as a cinematic influence, even if

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many of its seasoned practitioners still clung tenaciously

to the diminishing opportunities presented by television. A

good illustration is provided by an episode of The Jack Benny

Hour broadcast on 3 November 1965, in which Benny and guest

star Bob Hope seek to ingratiate themselves with their

patently stoned musical guests, The Beach Boys. After the

group lip-synchs through a rendition of “California Girls”

on a studio beach set, Hope and Benny drive up in a buggy

that has a surfboard prominently adorning its back seat. The

veteran vaudevillians are dressed in beach gear and trendy

wigs, and spout surfspeak in an attempt to mix it with the

tanned young beachniks. “Looks like a couple of senior

citizen drop-outs,” Brian Wilson comments as he eyes the

ludicrously out of place and out of style wannabe hipsters.

Wilson’s scripted remark italicizes the skit’s humorous

import, but even though Benny and Hope are clearly in on the

joke – and are expert practitioners of self-deprecating

humor – it nonetheless draws attention to the substantial

generational gulf that separates an increasingly obsolescent

vaudeville entertainment from rock’n’roll culture.9 Like

Benny and Hope, two forceful influences on his own work, by

the mid 1960s Tashlin was also a figure who was clearly out

of synch with the times.10

De Seife ends with two chapters that depart from the

chronological structure that coordinates the rest of his

monograph. Chapter 7 seeks to evaluate Tashlin’s

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contribution to US cinema by comparing him, on the one hand,

to auteur-directors such as Billy Wilder and Howard Hawks,

who invested their films with their creative personalities

and, on the other hand, to efficient technicians such as

Norman Z. McLeod and Norman Taurog, who helmed more generic

‘program pictures’. He concludes that Tashlin was a director

who blurred the line between the two groups, as “an auteur

who directed program pictures” (175). Unlike Wilder and

Hawks, Tashlin’s range was restricted to comedy – although,

unlike McLeod and Taurog, he certainly introduced a unique

style to the genre. In essence, de Seife here recasts the

old Cahiers du cinema distinction between auteurs and metteurs-

en-scène, although his extrapolation of the defining

characteristics of the auteur is not always especially

convincing. He claims, for example, that comedy auteurs

tackle major social issues in their satire, while program

directors rest content with parodying genre conventions or

Hollywood (178-80). This is certainly a dubious claim to

9 A similar effect is achieved when a red-sweatered Jerry Lewis duets with his pop singer son Gary on a version of TheBeatles’ “Help” in a 1965 episode of pop show Hullabaloo. Unlike Benny and Hope, however, Lewis clearly aims to be taken seriously in his attempt to ingratiate himself with the younger generation (see Levy 336).10 In his 1971 interview with Michael Barrier, Tashlin identifies Benny’s phenomenally successful radio program as one of the most significant inspirations for the humor of the Warner Brothers cartoons (Barrier 2004). He would actually work with Benny in the 1950s, directing him in two television plays for General Electric Theatre.

20

make about Howard Hawks, the majority of whose films display

a patent lack of interest in broader social issues but tend

to focus on more restricted social units, such as the self-

contained group or couple. Moreover, comedies such as Lover

Come Back, Bachelor in Paradise (1961) and The Thrill of It All (1963) –

by the ‘program directors’ Delbert Mann, Jack Arnold and

Norman Jewison – all offer some quite barbed satire of the

values of consumer society. So much for the claim that

“social satire of this kind is simply not a component of the

programmers’ films” (179)!

De Seife further seeks to distinguish auteurs from

program directors by claiming that: (a) the films of the

latter are less bawdy (176), and that (b) films from the

program directors manifest a far looser relationship between

gags and narrative (182-3). Once more, on the evidence

provided here I am not persuaded by the viability of these

generalizations. In this chapter, which is probably the most

disappointing in his monograph, de Seife seems to be

scurrying around to shore up a broader conceptual and

evaluative rationale for the preceding analysis of Tashlin’s

films. While I can see the logic of the author’s attempt to

position Tashlin within the hierarchy of Hollywood comedy

directors, and why this chapter needs to be here, he does

not always seem to be going about it in quite the right way.

His very reverence for Tashlin impedes a more level-headed

assessment of the questions raised by his awkward status as

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an auteur-director who dedicated himself wholeheartedly to

comedy. In this regard, Tashlin can once more be grouped

with figures such as Chaplin, Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Jerry

Lewis, who unashamedly embraced the comic muse and whose

directorial creativity was a direct outgrowth of their skill

with performance.

In his final chapter de Seife withdraws to safer

territory by exploring Tashlin’s influence on succeeding

filmmakers – especially Jean Luc Godard and Joe Dante, the

freewheeling comedy/horror director responsible for the two

Gremlins films (1984, 1990), Matinee (1993), Small Soldiers

(1998), and Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003). Both directors

have acknowledged their admiration for Tashlin, and have

included hommages to his work within their films. It is

rather unfortunate, however, that de Seife cites as an

example of the latter a sequence in Looney Tunes: Back in Action

where the main character wanders through the southwestern

desert and comes across the incongruous spectacle of a

Walmart store “shimmering like an oasis in the heat” (202).

Rather than being a nod to Tashlin’s work, this is quite

clearly a reference to the non-Tashlin film Road to Morocco

(1942), in which the sun-addled Bob Hope and Bing Crosby

stumble across a 1940s diner in the middle of the Sahara

desert – a vision that is retrospectively revealed to be a

mirage. It is telling, too, that while de Seife provides

numerous examples of intertextual references to Tashlin’s

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work in Godard’s films, he conveniently neglects to mention

the French director’s admiration for Jerry Lewis’s

filmmaking achievements. Godard’s 1972 film Tout Va Bien, for

example, included an extended homage to Lewis in the design

of its cross-sectioned factory set, which emulated the

gargantuan set Lewis had constructed for The Ladies Man.

Despite the shortcomings I have enumerated here, de

Seife’s book remains an infectiously enthusiastic and

illuminating study of a singular comic artist whose

considerable accomplishments are too often overlooked.

Tashlinesque will certainly encourage those interested in

comedy to seek out Tashlin’s cartoons and live action

feature films, which are increasingly available in digital

formats, and will doubtless prompt further discussion of

this intriguing filmmaker and his legacy. And that will be

no bad thing.

Works CitedBarrier, Michael. Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in its Golden Age. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.

Barrier, Michael. “Frank Tashlin: An Interview with Michael Barrier”. http://www.michaelbarrier.com/Interviews/Tashlin/tashlin_interview.htm, 2004.

Bogdanovich, Peter. Who the Devil Made It?. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Bogdanovich, Peter. Who the Hell’s In It?: Conversations with Legendary Film Stars. London: Faber & Faber, 2005.

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Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960. London: Routledge, 1985.

Crafton, Donald. “Performance in and of Animation,” Society forAnimation Studies Newsletter, 1 (16), July 2003.

Durgnat, Raymond. The Crazy Mirror: Hollywood Comedy and the American Image. London: Faber & Faber, 1969.

Fujiwara, Chris. Jerry Lewis, Urbana & Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2009.

Garcia, Roger and Bernard Eisenschitz (eds.). Frank Tashlin. London: Festival internationale del film Locarno & British Film Institute, 1994.

Godard, Jean Luc. “Hollywood or Bust”. Godard on Godard. Ed. Tom Milne. New York: Da Capo, 1986. 57-59.

Jenkins, Henry. What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic. New York: Columbia UP, 1992.

Johnston, Claire and Paul Willemen (eds.). Frank Tashlin. Colchester: Edinburgh Film Festival/ SEFT, 1973

Krutnik, Frank. “Jerry Lewis and the Deformation of the Comic”. Film Quarterly, 48 (1), 1994. 12-26.

Krutnik, Frank. Inventing Jerry Lewis. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001.

Krutnik, Frank. “‘Mutinees Wednesdays and Saturdays’: Carnivalesque Comedy and the Marx Brothers”. Ed. Andrew Horton and Joanna Rapf. A Companion to Film Comedy. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 87-110.

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Levy, Shawn. King of Comedy: the Life and Art of Jerry Lewis. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.

Lewis, Jerry and James Kaplan. Dean & Me (A Love Story). New York: Doubleday, 2005.

Mann, Denise. Hollywood Independents: The Postwar Talent Takeover. Minneapolis & London: U of Minnesota P, 2008.

Neale, Steve and Frank Krutnik. Popular Film and Television Comedy.London: Routledge, 1990.

Pomerance, Murray (ed.). Enfant Terrible!: Jerry Lewis in American Film. New York: New York UP, 2002.

Prouty, Howard. “Documentation”. Ed. Roger Garcia and Bernard Eisenschitz (eds.). Frank Tashlin. London: Festival internationale del film Locarno & British Film Institute, 1994. 185-240.

Rapf, Joanna E. “Comic Theory From a Feminist Perspective: ALook at Jerry Lewis”. The Journal of Popular Culture, 27 (1), Summer 1993. 192-203.

Rosen, Marjorie. Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies and the American Dream. New York: Avon Books, 1974.

Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “Tashlinesque”. Ed. Roger Garcia and Bernard Eisenschitz (eds.). Frank Tashlin. London: Festival internationale del film Locarno & British Film Institute, 1994. 23-27.

Sikov, Ed. Laughing Hysterically: American Screen Comedy of the 1950s. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.

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