In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, when filmmaker Frank Tashlin was asked what his movies were basically about, he replied, “I guess it’s the nonsense we call civilization.”
Colorful, outlandish, and hilariously, even charmingly vulgar, the comic feature films of writer and director Tashlin (1913–1972) just might have more to say collectively about American life in the 1950s and early 1960s than the work of any other studio employed filmmaker during that era. Tashlin was a frequently devastating satirist and he took aim at countless cultural targets of the postwar years: television, fashion, family life, music, and, especially, the movies. His own films often observed that overriding our nation’s interest in all of these things was an obsession with sex, an obsession that was not necessarily healthy or unhealthy, but a great subject to create gags around.
In The Girl Can’t Help It (screening April 3) and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (March 4), perhaps his two most acclaimed films, Tashlin used Jayne Mansfield, a blonde bombshell of exaggerated dimensions, as a walking embodiment of feminine sex. In eight features, including Artists and Models (March 28) and It’$ Only Money (April 17), Tashlin brought out the full comic potential of Jerry Lewis, a performer whose antics have been viewed by many as manifestations of the typical male id.
The film critic Andrew Sarris wrote that “the suspicion persists that if Tashlin had not had Jerry Lewis or Jayne Mansfield, he would have invented their equivalents.” But, of course, he already had invented their equivalents during his many years as a writer and director of animated cartoons at Warner Bros, where he worked with such stars as Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, and Bugs Bunny. Tashlin always dreamed of making features while he was in animation and he brought live-action techniques to Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies (witness the classic montages in the short film, Now That Summer Has Gone, screening before Susan Slept Here on March 21). Conversely, he made his live-action films seem as cartoonish as he could (check out Roy Rogers’s horse Trigger in bed with Bob Hope in Son of Paleface on March 6).
Tashlin’s work has been referenced in films by French new wavers like Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette, as well as by American post-modernists like Quentin Tarantino and Joe Dante. Although he’s the subject of occasional film festival and cinematheque retrospectives, his oeuvre has been sadly neglected, primarily because so many of his films, like Susan Slept Here, It$ Only Money, The First Time (March 13), The Lieutenant Wore Skirts (April 11), and Bachelor Flat (April 26), have not been made available on home video. Tashlin’s vivid use of color and the CinemaScope™ aspect ratio make his films ideal candidates for big screen viewing. We invite you to join us this March and April to laugh along with ten feature comedies by Frank Tashlin, each of which will be preceded by a selection of his finest animated short films.
