Most parodies are written out of admiration rather than contempt.
--Dwight MacDonald, Parodies: An Anthology (The Modern Library,1960).
The originality and power of Frank Tashlin resides in the fact that extremes, more diametrically opposed than ever before, touch us deeply.
--Roger Tailleur, (Frank Tashlin, Vineyard Press, 1973)
One can approve vulgarity in theory as a comment on vulgarity, but in practice all vulgarity is inseparable.
--Andrew Sarris on Frank Tashlin (The American Cinema, The University of Chicago Press, 1968)
I wrote about Frank Tashlin's The Disorderly Orderly on April 11, 2014. Most people today have never heard of Tashlin, even if they like Jerry Lewis, who credits Tashlin as an inspirational comic genius. In the 1980's Dan Talbot would sometimes show a double bill of Tashlin films, The Girl Can't Help It (1956) and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter(1957) at The Metro, brilliant parodies of rock-and-roll and the advertising business, respectively; they always delighted audiences with their expressive style and inspired use of color and cinemascope. But the two films here came later and were little understood, as parodies of family life in the fifties (Rock-A-Bye Baby) and of Agatha Christie (The Alphabet Murders).
Rock-A-Bye Baby gives credit to Preston Sturges's The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944), but is as different from that film as the forties were from the fifties, though Tashlin does copy one shot from the earlier film: as Jerry Lewis looks at newborn babies and asks which is his and the nurse mouths "all of them" and Lewis freaks out, just as Eddie Bracken did in Sturges's film (in which there were six babies). Rock-A-Bye Baby substitutes a satire of fifties motherhood for Stuges's subtle Christ story; in the Tashlin story the father is known, having played mother to triplets that his sister-in-law left with him while she shot the film "White Virgin of the Nile." Throughout the film there are parodies of movie musical production numbers, TV addicts who buy everything advertised on TV, and even Jerry Lewis as a version of Bill Haley, complete with "Comets" in plaid sportcoats But throughout there is an affection for those who suffer from unrequited love as well as for an Italian barber who can sing opera and learns to appreciate his daughters' independent choices. There are a number of effective songs by Harry Warren and Sammy Cahn, particularly when Lewis and his future father-in-law are singing the triplets to sleep: "Dormi, Dormi, Dormi." Tashlin uses color beautifully, with an emphasis on blue for peace-and-quiet and red for excitement (Lewis wears a blue bathrobe when he sings the triplets to sleep and a red tie when he performs rock-and-roll), highlighted by a red and blue mailbox in the center of a scene, a mailbox that contains an important letter.
The Alphabet Murders was shot in London in 1965 and is an affectionate parody of the Agatha Christie book, with Tony Randall as Hercule Poirot. The film is shot in black-and-white, unusual for Tashlin at this point, and is more character-driven than most of Tashlin's film. Tony Randall appears as himself at the beginning, on a soundstage, telling us about the character he will be playing. I have never cared for Christie and never know who the murderer is when all the suspects are finally gathered in a room, so the confusing plot didn't bother me and I was happy to see that the murderer was somewhat obvious from the beginning . Tashlin continues in this film to parody Hitchcock (especially with the scenes on a train at the end) and the film noir, which he had previously done in It's Only Money (again with strange camera angles) as well as "swinging London" and the films of Fellini, with his use of Anita Ekberg from La Dolce Vita (1960). Ekberg is not used in the somewhat cartoonish way (Tashlin started with cartoons and animated films) that Tashlin had used Jayne Mansfield in the fifties, as Tashlin tried to take a new approach in the sixties, reaching a dead end with Doris Day movies and dying in 1972 at the age of 59.
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