A book on the subject of American filmmaker Frank Tashlin has been vitally needed for decades now, and Ethan de Seife has filled that void - somewhat. I'm doubtful he'll achieve his goal of making Tashlin a more embracing subject. While I have noticed a resurgence of interest in his animated cartoons for Warner Bros. thanks to the vast majority of them being included on recent DVD compilations (so much so that fans are ranking them on the same level or even higher than esteemed "gods" like Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones), his live-action films are scattershot across so many distributors (and movie stars) to ensure a beneficial home video retrospective. The unjust 'blemish' on the director's reputation in the guise of Jerry Lewis is also simply too strong.
Unfortunately, the first 70 pages or so of "Tashlinesque", devoted to Tashlin's animation career and how it compares/contrasts with his live-action films, are almost a complete waste of time. In trying to dispel the myth that Tashlin did "live-action as cartoons" and "cartoons as live-action" and prove that they are really one singular body of work with the same driving ideology, De Seife reveals that he has absolutely no proficiency in dissecting what makes the animated cartoon tick. The irony is that I completely agree with de Seife's underlying sentiment, but he goes out of his way to dissect Tashlin's Warner cartoons in the most boring terms (many paragraphs devoted to average shot lengths and percentages). For some reason, Tashlin's handling of Bugs Bunny is deemed unworthy of commentary. His time at Disney's, and how he was not utilized, is not discussed.
Surely one will have to admit that there are distinct differences between the making of an animated cartoon and a live-action movie, specifically when it comes to the filmmaker's art/drawing style, and how he or she uses it to its fullest potential. De Seife doesn't even attempt to analyze how Tashlin's background as a print cartoonist greatly impacted his animated cartoons, an absolute necessity in establishing why Tashlin was such a unique, singular talent. Of the big Hollywood cartoon directors, Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, and Chuck Jones have been done justice on the printed page, but Tashlin remains woefully neglected (as has Friz Freleng). De Seife does nothing to rectify this.
Once de Seife gets into Tashlin's live-action career in the 1950s, the book gets considerably better. The most interesting passages are when we get a taste of how Tashlin got so much lurid material past the Production Code Administration (in short: he acknowledged that the censors wanted changes and responded by simply not making the changes). It's a wonderfully refreshing change from the endless horror stories that plague many film histories about how the Code brought down so many great ideas. Here we see a genius writer-director putting one after another over on the censors, by putting racier dialog in the middle of a long, single shot and retorting, "It'd be too expensive to reshoot it."
The Production Code was losing its teeth in the 1950s and became practically nonexistent in the 1960s. Almost cynically, this is when Tashlin's comedies began to lose their edge. Many times, writers go out of their way to not acknowledge that a director's work got considerably weaker later (see many essays/books on Alfred Hitchcock or Billy Wilder). Fortunately, de Seife doesn't do that, and goes into splendid detail about Tashlin's undeniable decline in the 1960s, bringing up the crucial point that he may have been negatively affected by collaborating with Jerry Lewis.
De Seife did a commendable job examining the live-action career of Tashlin, but you would be better off watching the Tashlin cartoons yourself and drawing your own conclusions. A primer to a true history of Frank Tashlin, no doubt, but whether one will be written at this point remains unlikely.
