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PrefaCe tashlin resurgent ...................................................................................... Director FrankTashlin has left an indelible impression on American and global film comedy. His films are some of the funniest, most visually inventive comedies ever made, and they feature landmark performances by some of the greatest comedians in American film history, a list that includes not only Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis, but Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, and Bugs Bunny.Tashlin’s unusual careeroffers fascinating insights into the ways in which vaudeville-style comedy shaped American film comedy ; the development, the flowering, and the legacy of the “Golden Age” of Hollywood animation; the complex histories of ribald sexual comedy and challenging satirical comedy within American film; the value and the power of the Auteur Theory; both the writings and the films of the French New Wave; the inner workings of the Hollywood studio system itself; and the power and indelibility of film genres. Yet Tashlin’s name is still largely unfamiliar, and his influence, though significant, is acknowledged by only a few acolytes. Even within film studies, his reputation is not as strong as it ought to be. As I argue in this book, Tashlin has been generally misunderstood for decades. It is the goal of this volume to put the films of Frank Tashlin in their proper context, and to show how and why his films are vital, important, and worthy of scrutiny. The most important context for understanding Tashlin’s films is that of comedy, the genre into which nearly all of his work must be categorized, and a major reason that his reputation is not stronger than it is. Tashlin is rarely cited as an influence by filmmakers and, aside from a small number of scholarly articles, has been largely ignored by the critical establishment. His films have won no awards, and the path of his scattershot extracinematic career is strewn with false starts and oddities . Even the most passionate cinephiles among my undergraduate film students do not recognize the director’s name. Tashlin’s star does not burn brightly in the film studies firmament. WhenTashlin’s decade-long partnershipwith Jerry Lewis ended with The Disorderly Orderly in 1964, the director began a slow fade into an obscurity that, save for isolated pockets of adulation composed of auteur x : P r e f a C e idolators like Peter Bogdanovich, has continued to the present day. He has not yet really been reclaimed by the cognoscenti in Hollywood or academe, though several of his contemporaries have been either officially recognized (Stanley Donen and Blake Edwards have both received “lifetime achievement” Oscars; Edwards’s films, at long last, are the subject of a book) or are the objects of devoted film-studies academic cults (Robert Aldrich, Anthony Mann, Nicholas Ray). But perhaps the tide is turning. The last decade or so has witnessed something of a newfound scholarly and popular interest in the films of Frank Tashlin. When I started writing this book, I was compelled to remark on the underrepresentation on video of Tashlin’s animated work. At that time, only the first two volumes of the Looney Tunes dvd sets had been released; among their 116 films is but a single Tashlin cartoon. Since then,Volumes 3, 4, 5, and 6 of this fine (if haphazardly organized) series have, by the time of this writing, made available more than two dozen Tashlin cartoons and Tashlin-oriented “bonus features” to the toon-hungry public. Online, two of the rarest of all Tashlin films have recently surfaced.The Lady Said No (1947; one of his few forays into stopmotion animation), served as the inaugural download at Cartoon Brew Films, a website run by animation historians/enthusiasts Jerry Beck and Amid Amidi. Even more improbably, Tashlin’s incredibly obscure, church-funded, anti-nuclear animated short, The Way of Peace (1947), has, through the efforts of researchers into the history of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, been digitized and uploaded for all to see.1 On the feature-film front,Twentieth Century-Fox released, in August 2006, a handsome three-disc Jayne Mansfield dvd set that includes two of Tashlin’s live-action masterpieces, The Girl Can’t Help It (1956) and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957); these films, too, have been “legitimized ” by the inclusion of commentary tracks and suchlike. And Paramount has finally done right by the legacy of one of its most profitable and important series: the two-volume, seven-disc “Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis Collection” has, at long last, given...

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