At last, at long last, Frank Tashlin gets the book he so richly deserves.
In his new book, Tashlinesque: The Hollywood Comedies of Frank Tashlin, Ethan de Seife offers a comprehensive overview of the director’s life and work, neatly organized in a sharp, compact volume, which finally affords the scholar or the casual reader a look at just how ridiculously productive Tashlin was. Not only was he a director of some of the 1950s most sharply observed satires, Tashlin is also a major figure in animation history, and one of the few animators who successfully made the jump to live action, creating a cohesive and cheerfully anarchic body of work.
While he’s not a household name, Frank Tashlin should be, as a man who began his work with the pioneering Van Beuren animation company, then moved over to Ub Iwerks’ studio, then labored for Leon Schlesinger as a “supervisor” (read “director”) on a stack of classic Looney Tunes, then went over to Disney as a writer, contributing scripts and gag ideas to a raft of projects, then quit Walt just before the animator’s strike of 1941 to work for the Columbia/Screen Gems cartoon unit — and why aren’t these cartoons available, especially Under The Shedding Chestnut Tree (1942)? — and then went back to Warner Bros. to write and/or direct another stack of memorable cartoons, as well as contributing his off-the-wall humor to the government sponsored Private Snafu series, and then began contributing stories and gags to everything from The Marx Bros. A Night in Casablanca (1946) to The Good Humor Man (1950), before finally getting a shot at directing live action as a “salvage job” on The Lemon Drop Kid (1951), a film nominally directed by Sidney Lanfield, but which did so poorly in previews that Lanfield was taken off the project, and Tashlin was hired to direct roughly thirty minutes of the final film.
This was just for openers. After that, Tashlin worked as a writer and/or director (sometimes without credit) on such films as My Favorite Spy (1951), Son of Paleface (1952), Susan Slept Here (1954), Artists and Models (1955), the crime drama Five Against the House (1955), and many, many other feature films, before finally coming in to his own with the landmark rock and roll comedy The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), with a title song by none other than Little Richard, and the acidulous Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), before hooking up with Jerry Lewis, and directing him in a series of films, as well as writing children’s books and making records on the side, just in case he got bored.
Are you tired yet?
Tashlin’s best work is brash, violent, and full of energy and cartoonish exaggeration; he works in broad brushstrokes, but when it comes to a critique of 1950s American society in all its aspects, Tashlin is hard to beat, as a major figure whose legacy has been ill-documented — until now.
Graced with numerous illustrations, including frame blowups and line drawings from Tashlin’s period as an animator, Tashlinesque: The Hollywood Comedies of Frank Tashlin by Ethan de Seife is a towering achievement, which gives the reader a complete rundown on the man and his work, starting with a brief chronology of Tashlin’s life and work in the opening chapter, “The Director Who Wasn’t,” and then moving smoothly through his work in animated cartoons, into his numerous writing assignments, his peak period as an auteur, and his later films, which are really afterthoughts to a brilliant career. De Seife also offers a very useful chapter towards the end of the volume on the directors who have been influenced by Tashlin, including everyone from Pedro Almodóvar to Jean-Luc Godard to Joe Dante.
Astoundingly, at least to me, Tashlin accomplished all of this by his mid 50s; he died at shortly before his 60th birthday, on May 2, 1972. Predictably, Tashlin was little appreciated in his homeland during his lifetime; just as predictably, the Cahiers du Cinéma critics picked up on him almost immediately, and heralded his work as fresh, new and revolutionary. Indeed, the title of de Seife’s book comes from this admiring quotation by the then-young firebrand Jean-Luc Godard, who noted that
“Frank Tashlin has not renovated the Hollywood comedy. He has done better. There is not a difference in degree between Hollywood or Bust and It Happened One Night, between The Girl Can’t Help It and Design for Living, but a difference in kind. Tashlin, in other words, has not renewed but created. And henceforth, when you talk about a comedy, don’t say, ‘It’s Chaplinesque,’ say, loud and clear, ‘It’s Tashlinesque.’”
Buy this book. Read It. It’s a superb account of the work of an authentic American Master.
