Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons

Tashlinesque

306 Tashlinesque According to Georges Sadoul, Frank Tashlin is a second-rank director because he has never done a remake of You Can’t Take It with You or The Awful Truth. According to me, my colleague errs in mistaking a closed door for an open one. In fifteen years’ time, people will realize that The Girl Can’t Help It served then—that is, today—as a fountain of youth from which the cinema now—that is, in the future—has drawn fresh inspiration. . . . To sum up, 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.’’ Jean-Luc Godard’s review of Hollywood or Bust in the July 1957 issue of Cahiers du cinéma is founded on a frank prophecy, only a small part of which has come true. In 1972, not many people realized the degree to which The Girl Can’t Help It influenced the modern cinema and not only Godard; and in 1994, alas, even fewer respond to the name Tashlin, much less ‘‘Tashlinesque.’’ Thus the fact that the adjective meant and continues to mean something at once specific and multifaceted requires some explication—including an explanation of why such a definition becomes necessary. I’m speaking here not only of the contemporary memory-hole into which most film history has disappeared—the amnesia that requires an explanation for many younger viewers of what, say, ‘‘Godardian’’ means—but of a historical breach of faith that took place in the 70s, when Godard’s prophecy was meant to be fulfilled. Whyitwasn’tfulfilled,despitearatificationofGodard’s1957predictioninmanyof his own films of the 1960s—such as references to cartoons in Band of Outsiders and Made in USA, the vending machine in Alphaville, and the cocktail party (color filters and all) in Pierrot le fou, not to mention the washing machine in Bertolucci’s Partner—can be attributed to several interlocking failures and resistances: 1. The development by Jerry Lewis of a writing and directing style both derived from and distinct from Tashlin’s (in its relative freedom from topical DISPUTABLE CONTENDERS 307 satire and its greater reliance on nonsense), beginning with The Bellboy in 1960, that subsequently confused the matter of who Tashlin was and what ‘‘Tashlinesque ’’ meant for spectators and critics on both sides of the Atlantic. 2. A decrease in the relative impact, energy, and satirical inflection of Tashlin ’s work, which arguably started around the same time. 3. A critical resistance to Tashlin in both England and the U.S., usually coupled with resistance to Lewis as well, and often accompanied by a preference for the more conservative and conformist wit of Blake Edwards. Indeed, by the late 70s, when a certain Francophobia had overtaken much of Anglo-American film criticism—during the same period when the New German Cinema had come to replace the French New Wave as the vanguard art cinema movement—a good many commentators who wished to disparage French film taste merely had to evoke French enthusiasm for Lewis in order to score points; on this level of pseudodiscussion, making any distinction between Lewis and his mentor was hair-splitting for anyone but specialists. 4. By the late 70s, the ascent of a more verbal and literary style of American comedy as represented by Woody Allen and Mel Brooks that made Tashlin even less fashionable. This is not to suggest that over the thirty-seven years since Godard’s prophecy the term ‘‘Tashlinesque’’ was not used—only that the use of such a term became increasingly esoteric. To cite two examples from my own experience: at a 1972 press conference in Cannes held by Jerzy Skolimowski after the screening of his King, Queen, Knave—a free-wheeling adaptation of Nabokov that I had liked and most of my colleagues had detested—I asked him what kind of importance Frank Tashlin (who had died in Hollywood only a few days before) had for him, noting the presence of what I believed to be a Tashlinesque style in his film. Skolimowski ’s reply was that he wasn’t sure he knew who Tashlin...