Frank Tashlin

Frank Tashlin (born February 19, 1913, Weehawken, New Jersey, U.S.—died May 5, 1972, Los Angeles, California) was an American cartoonist, writer, animator, and film director who specialized in broad satirical comedies. Tashlin directed his animated cartoons like live-action films—employing a wide range of cinematic techniques—and transposed the elastic composition, loud colour, boisterous gags, and disjointed reality of cartoons to the live-action films he wrote and directed, including popular vehicles for Bob Hope, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and Jayne Mansfield. Central to many of his films was the spoofing of popular culture, from comic books and advertising to television and popular music.

Early work

As early as 1927 Tashlin was drawing cartoons for his junior high school newspaper in Astoria, Queens, New York. At age 16 he went to work for animation pioneer Max Fleischer as an errand boy and assistant in his New York City studios. Tashlin then moved to nearby Van Beuren Studios (creators of the Aesop’s Film Fables series), where he worked his way up to animator, all the while moonlighting as a cartoonist. In 1933 Tashlin moved to Los Angeles and Warner Brothers, where he animated some of the early Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons, remaining there through much of the decade. During this period he also worked for a time as gagman for Hal Roach Studios, providing comic bits for the likes of Laurel and Hardy.

In 1939 Tashlin was hired by Disney as a story editor, and for the next two years he handled most of the Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck cartoons. He joined Columbia’s cartoon division in 1941 as an executive producer but returned to Warner Brothers, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Porky Pig in 1942. During World War II he created the instructional cartoon series Private Snafu for Frank Capra’s film unit of the U.S. Army Signal Corps.

Films of the mid-1940s to mid-1950s

Tashlin entered the world of live-action filmmaking when he scripted the Jane Powell vehicle Delightfully Dangerous (1945). After a year as a gagman for Eddie Bracken’s CBS radio show, Tashlin began to work full-time as a screenwriter, earning credits on Variety Girl (1947), the Bob Hope classic The Paleface (1948), The Fuller Brush Man (1948), and the Marx Brothers’ Love Happy (1949). He also wrote the comedies Miss Grant Takes Richmond (1949), featuring Lucille Ball; Kill the Umpire (1950); The Good Humor Man (1950); and The Fuller Brush Girl (1950) for director Lloyd Bacon. During the filming of the Tashlin-scripted The Lemon Drop Kid (1951), its star, Hope, asked Tashlin to take over for director Sidney Lanfiel, and, though Tashlin was not credited, the experience encouraged him to direct. He soon teamed with Hope on Son of Paleface (1952), in which Hope played the Harvard University-educated son of a gunfighter who heads west expecting to collect a fortune left to him by his father. Tashlin’s next films as a director were the marital farces The First Time (1952) and Marry Me Again (1953). Susan Slept Here (1954) featured Debbie Reynolds as a juvenile delinquent who ends up in the care of a screenwriter (played by Dick Powell).

Tashlin’s classic period as a director began with Artists and Models (1955), in which Dean Martin played a comic-book creator who uses the espionage-related dreams of his roommate (Jerry Lewis) as inspiration, provoking the interest of real spies. After The Lieutenant Wore Skirts (1956), with Tom Ewell and Sheree North, Tashlin directed (but did not write) Martin and Lewis’s final film as a team, Hollywood or Bust (1956).

Films of the late 1950s

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The Girl Can’t Help It (1956) was an inspired, wildly over-the-top comedy with the statuesque platinum-blonde bombshell Jayne Mansfield cast as the girlfriend of a retired gangster (Edmond O’Brien) who hires a press agent (Ewell) to make her a star. Using Mansfield as a kind of a three-dimensional cartoon, The Girl Can’t Help It combined broad comedy with legendary rock and roll performances by Little Richard, Fats Domino, Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps, and the Platters. Tashlin then produced, directed, and adapted George Axelrod’s Broadway play Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), which had launched Mansfield to stardom in 1955 (and for which she had won a Tony Award). A clever satire of the world of advertising and the American obsession with consumption, Tashlin’s film version centres on a Marilyn Monroe-like sex symbol (Mansfield) whose endorsement of a lipstick will make or break the career of an adman (Tony Randall). Featuring what most critics believe to be Mansfield’s best work, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? is Tashlin’s masterpiece, the appreciation of which has grown with time.

Rock-a-Bye Baby (1958), Tashlin’s first project with the now-solo Lewis, starred Marilyn Maxwell as an actress who has recently given birth to triplets and been widowed. Lewis played her befuddled babysitter. Lewis and Tashlin teamed again on The Geisha Boy (1958), in which Lewis played a clumsy magician who travels to Japan and South Korea to entertain the U.S. troops and becomes saddled with the care of a Japanese boy in the process. This pair of films, produced by Lewis, more or less established the formula that he would employ when he began directing himself. They were followed by Tashlin’s first real failure, Say One for Me (1959), a middling comedy that starred Bing Crosby as a priest.

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Films of the 1960s

In Cinderfella (1960) Lewis reenacted the Cinderella legend. Bachelor Flat (1962) comedically assayed the British-American culture clash and included one of Tashlin’s most-memorable CinemaScope images, a dachshund dragging a huge dinosaur bone across a beach. It’s Only Money (1962), which featured Lewis as a TV repairman who aspires to be a private detective, is less sentimental than the standard Lewis vehicle. Lewis also starred in Who’s Minding the Store? (1963), this time as an inept department-store clerk with a crush on an elevator operator (Jill St. John). Danny Kaye had the lead in The Man from the Diners’ Club (1963), which was based on a screenplay by William Peter Blatty, the future author of the best-selling novel The Exorcist (1971).

The Disorderly Orderly (1964), the last of the Tashlin-Lewis collaborations, was among their best and achieved cult status. Frenetic but also suspenseful and loaded with allusions to the films of Alfred Hitchcock—particularly Vertigo (1958)—it imagines Lewis as a failed medical student who takes a job in a private nursing home, where his mental instability mixes with that of the residents; mishaps ensue. The Alphabet Murders (1965) featured Randall as Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, with mixed results, whereas The Glass-Bottom Boat (1966) was an enormously successful comedy in which star Doris Day is mistaken for a Russian spy. Caprice (1967) starred Day as an industrial spy. Hope and Phyllis Diller were paired in The Private Navy of Sgt. O’Farrell (1968), which failed at the box office and proved to be Tashlin’s final film.

Like Lewis, Tashlin was highly esteemed by some proponents of the auteur theory of filmmaking associated with the French journal Cahiers du Cinéma, especially Jean-Luc Godard. Over the years, appreciation has also grown among a wider group of cineastes for a number of Tashlin’s films, most notably Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, The Girl Can’t Help It, and The Disorderly Orderly. Tashlin was also the author and illustrator of the children’s book The Bear That Wasn’t (1946).