Frank Tashlin

[domino harvey]

Frank Tashlin (1913-1972)



"[Y]ou get no credit for doing a Lewis picture."


Filmography (Animation)

Porky's Poultry Plant (1936) Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol 4 (Warners R1)

Little Beau Porky (1936) Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol 4 (Warners R1)

Porky in the North Woods (1936) Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol 4 (Warners R1)

Porky's Road Race (1937) Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol 3 (Warners R1)

Porky's Romance (1937) Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol 3 (Warners R1)

Porky's Building (1937)

Porky's Railroad (1937) Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol 4 (Warners R1)

Speaking of the Weather (1937) Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol 3 (Warners R1)

The Case of the Stuttering Pig (1937) Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol 4 (Warners R1)

Porky's Double Trouble (1937) San Quentin or Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol 5 (Both Warners R1)

Porky at the Crocadero (1938) Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol 5 (Warners R1)

Now That Summer is Gone (1938) Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol 4 (Warners R1)

Porky the Fireman (1938) Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol 4 (Warners R1)

Have You Got Any Castles? (1938) Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol 2 (Warners R1)

Porky's Spring Planting (1938)

The Major Lied 'Til Dawn (1938)

Wholly Smoke (1938) Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol 5 (Warners R1)

Cracked Ice (1938) Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol 4 (Warners R1)

Little Pancho Vanilla (1938) Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol 4 (Warners R1)

You're an Education (1938) Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol 4 (Warners R1)

The Fox and the Grapes (1941)

The Tangled Angler (1941)

A Hollywood Detour (1942)

Dog Meets Dog (1942)

A Battle For a Bottle (1942)

Cinderella Goes to a Party (1942)

Song of Victory (1942)

Porky's Pig Feat (1943) Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol 3 (Warners R1)

Scrap Happy Daffy (1943) Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol 5 (Warners R1)

Puss n' Booty (1943) Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol 4 (Warners R1)

I Got Plenty of Mutton (1944) Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol 4 (Warners R1)

Swooner Crooner (1944) Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol 3 (Warners R1)

Brother Brat (1944)

Plane Daffy (1944) Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol 4 (Warners R1)

Booby Hatched (1944) Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol 4 (Warners R1)

The Stupid Cupid (1944) Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol 4 (Warners R1)

The Cross-Eyed Bull (1945)

The Unruly Hare (1945) Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol 4 (Warners R1)

A Tale of Two Mice (1945)

The Lady Said No (1946)

Daffy Ditties: Pepito's Serenade (1946)

Choo Choo Amigo (1946)

The Flying Jeep (1946)

The Fatal Kiss (1946)

The Way of Peace (1947)


Filmography (Live Action)

One Touch of Venus (1948) (Screenplay only)

The Paleface (1948) (Screenplay only) (Universal R1)

Miss Grant Takes Richmond (1949) (Screenplay only)

Love Happy (1949) (Screenplay only)

The Good Humor Man (1950) (Screenplay only)

KIll the Umpire (1950) (Screenplay only)

The Fuller Brush Girl (1950) (Screenplay only)

The Lemon-Drop Kid (1951) (Screenplay only) (BCI/Eclipse R1)

The First Time (1952)

Son of Pale Face (1952) (BCI/Eclipse R1)

Marry Me Again (1953)

Susan Slept Here (1954) (Warners Archive DVD-R)

Artists and Models (1955) Martin and Lewis Vol 2 (Paramount R1)

The Lieutenant Wore Skirts (1956)

The Girl Can't Help It (1956) Jayne Mansfield Collection (Fox R1)

Hollywood or Bust (1956) Martin and Lewis Vol 2 (Paramount R1)

Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957) Jayne Mansfield Collection (Fox R1) (Masters of Cinema Blu-Ray R2)

Rock-a-Bye-Baby (1958) (Olive R1 / Paramount R2)

The Geisha Boy (1958) (Olive R1 / Paramount R4)

Say One For Me (1958)

Cinderfella (1960) (Paramount R1)

Bachelor Flat (1962)

It'$ Only Money (1962) (Olive R1)

The Man From the Diner's Club (1963) (Columbia R2)

Who's Minding the Store? (1963) (Olive R1)

The Disorderly Orderly (1964) (Paramount R1)

The Alphabet Murders (1965)

The Glass Bottom Boat (1966) Doris Day Collection Vol 1 (Warners R1)

Caprice (1967) (Fox R1)

The Shakiest Gun in the West (1968) (Screenplay only) (Universal R1)

The Private Navy of Sgt. O'Farrell (1968) (BCI/Eclipse R1)


Books (By Tashlin)

The Bear That Wasn't (1946)

The Possum That Didn't (1951)

The World That Isn't (1951)

How to Create Cartoons (1952)


Books (On Tashlin)

Frank Tashlin (1973) Ed. Paul Willemen and Claire Johnston

Frank Tashlin (1994) Eds. Roger Garcia and Bernard Eisenschitz

Laughing Hysterically: American Screen Comedy of the 1950s (1994) Ed Sikov -- Contains a lengthy and reductive chapter on Tashlin

Who the Devil Made It? (1998) Interview by Peter Bogdanovich


Web Resources

An Interview by Michael Barrier

Senses of Cinema

16:9 in English


Forum Discussion

Doris Day Collections

The Girl Can't Help It

The Jayne Mansfield Collection

Jerry Lewis

Jerry Lewis on DVD

Looney Tunes

[Saimo]

He also wrote How to Create Cartoons (1952).

Web Resources
An Interview by Michael Barrier
Senses of Cinema
16:9 in English

[domino harvey]

Thanks, I've updated the first post!

[domino harvey]

The wonderful New York Review of Books is reprinting Tashlin's The Bear That Wasn't this March

[Saimo]

Tashlin's The Bear That Wasn't

Masterpiece. =D>

[domino harvey]

Given the scarcity of non-Lewis or Day Tashlins on DVD (outside of the only two Tashlins anyone ever wants to talk about, of course), I was quite excited to finally get a chance to see Bachelor Flat through back channels. But anticipation turned to disappointment and quite rapidly dumbfounded shock: How could Tashlin take such slam-bang elements as

* Tuesday Weld
* Terry-Thomas (as a university sex object!)
* A dauschand with a hankering for a giant dinosaur bone
* Celeste Holm (Billed after the dog, I might add)
* Ready-set satire targets like the academic world, British vs American culture clash, sex farce misunderstandings, the vanity of the California beach bum set, dinosaur bones, etc

...and utterly blow every opportunity for comedy? I can remember like exactly one actual joke that even elicited a smile, involving Thomas fantasizing about Weld first as a helpless Eleanor Parker in Caged-type getting beaten on her absurdly upturned posterior, followed by Weld being released from prison and retaking up crime as a cigar-chomping Sandanista who threatens to "Steal Jags-- and shoot Jag owners!" But delightful flights of fancy like that are scarce in the film. It also doesn't help that every so often Tashlin swipes a joke from his funniest film, Susan Slept Here-- don't remind me of a better movie during a lousy one!

Not only is the film a lead balloon on the comedy-front, it's near incoherent on a basic narrative level too. This is really the worst kind of bad: made by talented people, with the right ingredients, but mixed all wrong.

[roujin]

Bachelor Flat used to be on Hulu of all places, but I (thinking it would be on there for a while) put it off and missed it.

[HarryLong]

* Celeste Holm (Billed after the dog, I might add)

Seems appropriate given Ann Baxter's comment that the only bitch on the set of ALL ABOUT EVE was Holm..

[domino harvey]

After being pretty soured on 60s Tashlin after misfires like Caprice, the Disorderly Orderly and the above-mentioned Bachelor Flat, I didn't go into the Man From the Diners' Club with high hopes. But here is a film that reaffirms Tashlin's genius, a whiplash-paced screwball comedy with Danny Kaye turning in an enormously physical turn as a lowly credit approval worker who finds himself involved in increasingly chaotic scenarios in the process of reclaiming a criminal's mistakenly approved credit card. I complained that Bachelor Flat provided Tashlin with a crop of great targets and hit none, but here's what a perfect game looks like: Credit cards, computers, gyms, beatniks, even highways get the Tashlin teardown to great returns. In addition to these key elements, one of the film's great pleasures is seeing so many auteurist touches from Tashlin-- his fear of technology born from a skepticism of advancement, cartoonish extensions of reality, breast jokes-- that if it were in color and had a TV burn, I'd say it was the Tashlin experience.

The cast is great, particularly Cara Williams as Telly Savalas' stripper girlfriend, who proves to be one of Tashlin's best female leads. Harry Dean Stanton has a funny little cameo as a bongo-playing-type who at one point spouts a nonsensical beat poem take of Dickens' A Christmas Carol. But it all boils down to Kaye, whose smaller-than-life approach deflects the absurdity rather than embracing it ala Jerry Lewis. Kaye underplays as he is subjected to a handful of increasingly erratic set pieces and while it's hard to pick a favorite, the scene with Kaye trying to obtain and later obscure the Diners' Club letter in Savalas' office in particular is tremendous (though there's something to be said for the total Looney Tunes anarchy of the finale).

The Man From the Diners' Club ranks with the highest tier of Tashlin, and while it's not available on DVD in the states, some kind soul has uploaded a pristine 16X9 copy to YouTube. No excuse not to enjoy this one right now.

[Perkins Cobb]

I don't remember it well enough to be very specific, but I thought Bachelor Flat was hilarious. And Sarris says it's Tashlin's best film in The American Cinema. So that's two thumbs-up votes, at least.

[roujin]

Yeah, but Sarris isn't exactly Tashlin's biggest fan.

He writes that "although Tashlin is impressively inventive, particularly with gadgets and animals, he has never been sympathetic enough to any of his characters to forego a laugh at their expense. The one possible exception is the sweet, anonymous British girl in Bachelor Flat, Tashlin's best film. Ultimately, frenetic farce, however inventive, is self-defeating without a theory of character. Up to now, Tashlin has dealt almost exclusively with caricatures instead of characters, and so unless we are entering an age of robot comedy, the problem of Tashlin will remain a problem of taste."

[domino harvey]

And of course Tuesday Weld isn't British in the film, Terry-Thomas is.

Just because Tashlin is wiling to use everyone at his disposal to make a satiric point (as the very necessity of satire demands such tactics) doesn't mean he sells them out wholesale. As for the lack of complex characterization, well, that too would cloud his ultimate satiric goals, wouldn't it? It's a bit like complaining that Bergman films take themselves too seriously.

And FYI, re: comedy: Sarris thought Juno was the best film of the year.

[Jaime_Weinman]

And of course Tuesday Weld isn't British in the film, Terry-Thomas is.

I think Sarris was talking about that English girl ("Miss Pilkington") who Terry-Thomas keeps saying "hello" to.

[domino harvey]

Thank God for the Fox Movie Channel. Finally got a chance to enjoy Tashlin's first Cinescope film, the Lieutenant Wore Skirts, and you gotta love how he fills that first non-second unit 'Scope frame:



The film was produced in the midst of Tashlin's best period and, sandwiched between Artists and Models and the Girl Can't Help It, would probably be overlooked even if it were available on DVD. It's a real scream though, full of the brilliant compositions and comedic energy that marks Tashlin's best work. Just watching the camera move around the set is funny-- you could watch the film on mute and it'd still work. It's also pretty dirty, even for Tashlin. I mean, if you thought the Girl Can't Help It's breast jokes were too subtle, good news, he not only recycles, he one-ups:





Where's our Blu-ray Tashlin boxed set, World?

[domino harvey]

From a few weeks ago, courtesy of Google Cache:

The Alphabet Murders, the dry run to his two Doris Day spy films, finds Tashlin adrift. The biggest problem is that Tashlin is not a director concerned with narrative and the mystery genre, even comical in outings, relies heavily on narrative clarity and construction. So this marriage was doomed at the outset. Tashlin has his fun and while it's pretty clear he could give a damn about the material, sometimes that anarchy works. But even as dumb a story as this, and lord, the Agatha Christie source probably deserved the treatment it gets, the film still has to function as a mystery film and thus bombs. It doesn't help that by the end of the film, I could barely distinguish the ones whodunnit from the other nondescript suspects.

Another concurrent problem with the film is that Tashlin is an intrinsically American director, maybe the most American comedic director of the classical era. This film has a thoroughly British feel and the two opposing styles, again, clash and burn. Tony Randall's grasp on both the character and the accent is a bit sketch, but he is occasionally amusing as Hercule Poirot. However, Albert Finney's performance in a serious Christie adaptation eight years later is a hell of a lot funnier, and thus there's no real reason to ever watch this film unless you're a Tashlin completest... like me. Oh Auteur Theory, you skank.

[zedz]

Resurrected from a PM to domino after he convinced me to buy the UK Jerry Lewis box set, cos he thought the Tashlin thread was getting a little lonesome:

Took the plunge last night with, at your suggestion, The Geisha Boy.

First things first, Lewis himself is only about 50% tolerable for me. His straight scenes are fine, and the pure physical slapstick is okay, but his gurning schtick oversells and overwhelms all the gags to which it's applied, making them less funny rather than more so.

That said, Tashlin is such a superb visual stylist, that potential deal-breaker is relegated to merely a minor annoyance. He's an absolute master of fundamentally comic mise-en-scene, and the way he made so much of the film seem like a live-action Chuck Jones cartoon - without being overtly cartoony (except for Lewis' performance, and he's no Daffy Duck) - is invigorating and somewhat miraculous. Just about any sequence involving the bunny provides almost a classical illustration of how every element, including colour and composition, either enhances or detracts from the funny, and Tashlin never puts a foot wrong.

So Lewis himself ran hot and cold, the storyline never progressed beyond obvious stuff (though having Lewis as the infantilised character at least mitigated the usual paternalistic attitudes to the Orient), but the joyous filmmaking made this work. And, oh boy, you were right about the stunning transfer. Apart from a couple of tough-to-render patterns (e.g. some shimmer among the pebbles) it was hard to believe this was only SD.

Oh, and the UK box has the most ridiculous packaging I've ever seen: one long eternal slotted foldout which I need to lay down on a bench if I want to extract a disc, with nothing on all those acres of cardboard, no stills, no film titles, just a blue expanse. The bare basic contractual obligation credits appear in the first fold, and there are blurbs for every film on the back of the box (all but illegible, tiny black printing on royal blue ground, with a quarter-of-a-postage-stamp-sized still alongside). Nevertheless, quite a bargain, particularly if all the transfers are up to this standard.

[Gregory]

Is that Lewis set completely barebones? I already have the R1 Lewis set containing all the films in the UK one except for Geisha Boy and Rock-A-Bye-Baby (and it adds The Stooge) and I wouldn't want to replace it unless both have more or less the same commentaries and other extras. I wouldn't mind too much losing The Stooge, though it's not a bad film. If I had both boxes, it would be a shame to duplicate nine films at one go, even if it only cost me £16 for the second one.

[domino harvey]

Those two titles were released separately on discs identical to the UK ones in Australia

[Gregory]

They're a little on the pricy end, though, especially for blind-buys.

[zedz]

Is that Lewis set completely barebones? I already have the R1 Lewis set containing all the films in the UK one except for Geisha Boy and Rock-A-Bye-Baby (and it adds The Stooge) and I wouldn't want to replace it unless both have more or less the same commentaries and other extras. I wouldn't mind too much losing The Stooge, though it's not a bad film. If I had both boxes, it would be a shame to duplicate nine films at one go, even if it only cost me £16 for the second one.

Most of the films have got (presumably the same) extras, including Lewis commentaries and deleted scenes / outtakes. The sparse commentaries are almost uniformly terrible, with Lewis simply watching the film with a buddy and laughing at his own jokes from time to time. Occasionally he'll rouse himself to patronise a cameo player or ingenue, but he is extraordinarily stingy with any credit that might actually mean something. For instance, I think Frank Tashlin warrants only one or two mentionsover the entire set, and those for when he had the temerity to take issue with the Godlike Genius of Jerry. The only particularly revealing moments are when he takes a potshot at somebody. I remember he says that doing physical comedy with Sebastian Cabot was "like acting with a waterbed" - which is admittedly a good line.

[What A Disgrace]

A new Bob Hope collection came out today, with the now OOP Son of Paleface included within, along with Tashlin's final film The Private Navy of Sergeant O'Farrell. I'm not sure if the former contains a new transfer or not.

[domino harvey]

The box also includes a pic by recent forum cause célèbre Gerd Oswald! I can't believe I'm going to end up spending money for Bob Hope films, but here we are.

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

Bachelor Flat is by no means Tashlin's best film, but it's not at all that terrible. It's not as great as the film in borrows (lightly) from, Susan Slept Here, but it isn't without it's charm. The entire idea of collegiate girls swooning over a neurotic and uptight British gentleman is a very, very funny concept, but the problem with the film is the it can't maintain narrative cohesiveness. The British gentleman is the center of the film, but at the same time, the girl who moves in with him and the beat-nik (played terribly by Richard Beymer who hams it up in the worst way) seem to pull away from the story and just seem to fill in the time where Tashlin and co-writer Budd Grossman might have had problems filling in a story. We get glimpses of Terry-Thomas' fiance (Celeste Holm) but it never feels like there is space to let her character and the others fully grow. Gags come at weird and almost random points, like where Richard Beymer all of the sudden convinced Terry-Thomas that it would be a good idea to get drunk to repel women, but it doesn't really build to that point smoothly. Tashlin seems soft on his his usual satirical targets, but I'm sure that's all because the story and characters are so poorly developed. Good gags should help develop story and character, something that seems difficult here.

That isn't to say the film is terrible. There are funny moments, but like Domino said, they are spread out oddly. It has a very cute intro and a cute, typically fifties soundtrack is done by John Williams(!). I feel the best character is actually Gladys who is pretty interesting and given some dimension as a goofy and a little bit angry of a girl who can really push peoples buttons. The first scene that she shows up in and sneaks in Terry-Thomas' house is so tense and the great sight gag of her and Tuesday Weld running around Terry-Thomas' bedroom is a so much fun to watch.

If anything, the film is a visual treat and enforces in me that Frank Tashlin is one of the best directors who took full advantage of the scope format:




But I'm am absolutely convinced Frank Tashlin is the Russ Meyer of women's legs. I've never seen legs as good as the ones in his films and Bachelor Flat just happens to have the best ones I've seen so far.



By the way, Domino or anyone else, have you picked up the new Bob Hope set by Shout Factory? I'm curious about hearing opinions on The Private Navy of Sgt. O'Farrell, mostly because it looks so out-of-date with the era it came out in. It had a bunch of actors way past their prime (making me wonder does Gina Lollbrigida still look sexy at 40?) and making a comedy about WWII at the peak of Vietnam seems like a bad idea.

[domino harvey]

A new Bob Hope collection came out today, with the now OOP Son of Paleface included within, along with Tashlin's final film The Private Navy of Sergeant O'Farrell. I'm not sure if the former contains a new transfer or not.

The Pvt. Navy of Sgt O'Farrell is cropped, sadly. So are some of the other films in the set. The Oswald is widescreen. "Great" work, Shout!

[swo17]

Do they at least crop out Bob Hope?