BIBLIO WATCHDOG TASHLINESQUE
THE HOLLYWOOD COMEDIES OF FRANK TASHLIN By Ethan de Seife
2012, Wesleyen University Press,
www.wesleyen.edu, 215 Long Lane, Middletown CT 06459, 272 pp., Hardcover, $35
Reviewed by Charlie Largent I
In all of Frank Tashlin’s work, there is nothing quite so boldly staged as the delirious sequence in 1961’s THE LADIES MAN, in which Jerry Lewis (the film’s di- rector and Tashlin’s nominal pupil) deconstructs a panic at- tack in 25s. Framed against an enormous set that resembles the interior of a gargantuan and painstakingly detailed doll- house, Lewis’ character, a ter- rified schlemiel by the name of Herbert H. Heebert, is in the midst of a mad dash up the set’s elaborate staircase when sud- denly he’s literally beside himself with fright, splitting into two, then three, then four similarly
fearstruck replicants, zig-zagging about the hallways until they all disappear one after another into the safety of their bedroom, the door slamming in quick succession with four emphatic bangs. No, there was nothing close to this deft and dizzy blend of Psychol- ogy 101 and slapstick in Tashlin’s portfolio, but it’s safe to say that Lewis could never have designed and delivered it so well without his mentor having blazed the trail.
Frank Tashlin began his career in 1933, direct- ing the energetically elastic cartoon duo of Tom and Jerry in a Van Beuren Studio short, ”Hook and Lad- der Hokum” and closed up shop with 1968’s dead- on-arrival pleasure-killer, THE PRIVATE ARMY OF SGT. O’FARRELL. In between, he merely revolution- ized the language of film comedy. From The Three Stooges to DUMB AND DUMBER, the movies have a long history of live-action comedies populated by paper-thin cartoon characters. But it took Tashlin to reinvent the live-action comedy using the painstaking
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directorial techniques employed in a 7m cartoon.
A new book from film historian Ethan de Seife, TASHLINESQUE: THE HOLLY- WOOD COMEDIES OF FRANK TASHLIN, is a fairly scrupulous examination of those tech- niques, as well as the impu- dent artist’s quixotic journey from cartoonist to film direc- tor, two vocations that de Seife views, at least in Tashlin’s case, as inextricably linked. De Seife sifts through the frames of Tashlin’s early work at Warner Bros. beginning in 1932 and finds that, even at that early date, the brilliant ani-
mator was fine-tuning an approach that would come into play years later in his live action com- edies; de Seife suggests that Tashlin’s search for the perfect gag sequence, where the joke is not just a joke, but a story device integral to the film’s narrative, began with Porky Pig and came to frui- tion with Jayne Mansfield.
Tashlin was, among other things, a sexual pro-
vocateur par excellence, and he jumped at the chance to plant this satirically charged sex-bomb at the center of his latest cinematic tinderbox. In doing so, he would define Mansfield’s persona; a complai- sant sex doll, inflated beyond any realistic propor- tions, sporting a platinum headdress and the helium-tinged voice of a cartoon character. In other words, a portrait of Marilyn Monroe painted by the man who directed Daffy Duck.
Though he considers the comedies made with
Mansfield (THE GIRL CAN’T HELP IT and WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER?) to be Tashlin’s
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