Last night, the UW Cinematheque Fall Semester program began with the first two films of the Frank Tashlin retrospective. I've been looking forward to this retro since it was announced, since Tashlin is held in high esteem by some quarters (including yun-fat), and a couple of years ago the Cinematheque had a Tashlin night where they played two of his WWII-era Looney Tunes as well as his film
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?. Given that background, I was very interested in this all but forgotten auteur (at least in America, if he is known by some, it is mainly for his work with Jerry Lewis and Jayne Mansfield). The retrospective began with his first feature film as a director, the 1952 domestic comedy
The First Time and his 1954 film
Susan Slept Here (the program notes explained that technically, Tashlin began his directing career with the Bob Hope vehicle
The Lemon Drop Kid when the original director was fired and someone had to do reshoots; previously, Tashlin had worked as an animator, gag writer, and screenwriter in the 40s and 50s).
The 1952 film,
The First Time was an auspicious debut (he was also credited as one of the four screenwriters). The black and white domestic comedy stars Robert Cummings (Joe Bennet) and Barbara Hale (Betsey Bennett) as a young married couple expecting their first child, and it is very interesting, not only as a frequently funny comedy, but because it takes the 1950s American ideal of a wife, a kid, a car, and a suburban tract house and submits it to some quite critical scrutiny, providing a social critique that almost rivals those of Douglas Sirk's melodramas (though the brilliant comedy gags somewhat act as a salve on the film's darker undercurrents). The film begins with a crane shot of a suburban tract house, and a childish voice-over narrator begins to speak about his home and his parents; the film itself is narrated by the then unborn child of Joe and Bestsey, who is later revealed as a boy named Timmy (actually, Timmy is not actually seen until the last shot of the film, we hear alot of his crying, some of his voice-over, all bundled up or in a stroller, or in a reflection, but never a directly revealing shot until the last shot of the movie). On this night in question, Timmy is born, beginning the couple's odyssey. The film doesn't flinch from the realities of childbirth, right from the start money becomes a huge issue (when paying the hospital bill, they are $88 short, and Joe has to write a bad check to cover the hospital bills), two times in the movie, Timmy is referred to as a "millstone" around Joe's neck. Joe himself doesn't make enough money at his dream job, an architect, and compromises and quits, joining his father as a door to door washing machine salesman (unfortunately, Joe is saddled with a defective washing machine and the inability to be a good salesman). While Joe deals with the financial crisis, Betsey is forced to deal with stress and post-partum depression, meddling grandmothers (her mother, Cassie, is a glamourous divorcee, referred to as a "low rent Gloria Swanson." his mother is a matronly women), and a stern, taskmaster of a personal nurse, who insists on keeping a very, very rigid schedule, a schedule so rigid that Betsey is terrified of deviating even a little bit from it. There is a very funny scene, after the nurse leaves, when as the baby naps, Betsey is reading a parenting magazine that advises her that a noisy baby is a healthy baby; since Timmy is not making a sound, she becomes anxious and goes to the nursery and holds a mirror to the baby's face. Relieved that the baby is alive, she backs up and knocks over a bottle, causing Timmy to start crying; however, since the baby is supposed to be napping and can't be fed until 10am (which is in 10 minutes) she panics completely, starts setting the clocks forward, hesitates, and when he husband calls to say hello, she breaksdown and Joe is forced to insist it is 10am. Of course, theire are the travails of the late night feedings; Betsey has been proscribed sedatives, so Joe takes over the 2am feedings, bleery eyed, he begins to boil a bottle of Blatz Beer before he realizes his mistake; Betsey then too wakes up, and gets a bottle; it's farcical how the two tired, bleer-eyed adults narrowly miss each other. Another funny scene involves their first night out and their attempts to find a sitter. Betsey nixes the first sitter as too young, and the second as too old; she eventually arranges for a baby sitter and sends Joe out to pick her up at the bus stop. Unfortunately, he goes to the wrong busstop and picks up an easy shopgirl, creating a bit of misunderstanding and some of Tashlin's trademark bawdy humor.
Joe's frustration with his job and their financial situation, and her frustration at being left alone and overwhelmed with the housework and baby care begins to take it's toll on their marriage. They begin to get into bitter fights about money and housework (he complains that all they eat is tuna or coldcuts, and that he has to drink warm beer); after buying her a sexy black negligee that she talked about in the beginning of the movie, Joe prepares a candlelit meal of coldcuts that degenerates into squabbling and sarcasm. It's very funny how Tashlin stages this scene; he has the actors over-ennunciate their words so that every time they speak, a blast of air blows the candleflame towards the other spouse. This fight leads into their next fight, going home expecting the worst, Joe finds his house spotless and his wife dressed in the sexy black negligee; what seems to be a scene of 1950s wifely acquiesence quickly becomes tinged with anger and sarcasm, as she begins to lash out at him, stuffing a muffin in his mouth and calling him "Hitler." His answer, he goes out with his neighbor and gets blind stinking drunk, ending up in the wrong house (he insists it is his house since he has "lived their for 28 payments"; the way Tashlin stages this scene, a single long shot/long take, makes the scene play like a prisoner exchange). Soon, however, Betsey realizes that she is pregnant again (her cravings for bannana's are a signifier of her pregnancy throughout the film; in one scene, as she works up the courage to tell Joe, he is eating a bananna while writing out the bills, her eyes follow every motion of the bananna), but Joe manages to get frustrated at his boss and job (not to mention father, who he accusses of being a brownnoser) and quits/gets fired. Betsey asks Joe to leave, she wants to live like her mother, and he obliges; however, Cassie intercedes and tells Betsey how lonely her existence truly is in a monologue that pushes the film into melodramatic territory; Joe storms out in his '41 Sedan and knocks over his trash cans, he looks out and sees all of the bannana peels and then drives off; Tashlin again uses a long take, as the car drives down the road in a diagonal recessional, and then suddenly comes to a screeching halt and then reverses and drives back. Joe realizes that Betsey is pregnant again and they reconcile. Cut to a few months later and their is an indentical shot sequence from the beginning, though this time the voice-over narration is that of a little girl, and the final shot of baby Timmy. The VO intones that in that year, her parents grew up more than her baby brother. I really liked this film, except for the ending, it doesn't sugarcoat the harsh realities of parenthood, while never forgetting the comedy. Again, a B-movie comedy is more realistic and entertaining than any 1950s prestige picture.
Susan Slept Here was a 1954 Technicolor comedy, which has the distinction of being narrated by an Oscar statuette (the Oscar statuette talks with boom self-importance, and wishes he was rewarded to the Best Supporting Actress instead of his brother; later he expresses anxiety when divorce comes up, as he is worried about California's community property laws). The Oscar in question belongs to Mark Christopher, played by Dick Powell (who also played a screenwriter in
The Bad and the Beautiful), a successful comedy screenwriter who has quit his studio after they refused to let him write serious pictures. Now suffering from writer's block, he is firmly ensconced in his bachelor existence despite his engagement to icy socialite Isabelle (Ann Francis); he is aided by his middle-aged secretary Maude (a cynical, yet hopeless romantic, looking for love, and someone who learned about parenthood from typing the script to
Stella Dallas), his old Navy-buddy Virgil, who despite his invented job as Mark's assitant is quite directionless, his lawyer Harvey, who has been rendered neurotic by his teenage daughter, and his black maid Georgette. On Christmas Eve, two vice cops, one of whom was a technical advisor on one of Christopher's movies, bring a 17 year old girl named Susan (played by Debbie Reynolds) to his apartment; they heard that he was doing a JD film so they brought her over for some research, that, and they didn't want her to be in jail over the holidays (another theme reprised by one of my favorite Mitchell Leisen movies,
Remember the Night). Mark learns that she is a good kid, and is determined to keep her out of jail. He takes her to Vegas and marries her to keep her out of jail; his plan is to annul the marriage after a few months, and he goes off to write his screenplay in the mountains of Idaho. She, on the otherhand, has fallen in love with her benefactor, and not only does she exploit her newfound wealth, she struggles to "improve" herself by taking various lessons so she would have more in common with Isabelle. Of course, she refuses to sign the annullment papers, which hinges on the fact that they have not consummated their union, and when, via a culinary misunderstanding, everyone thinks that Susan is pregnant, Mark returns insanely jealous and realizes his love for Susan. The reconcile, and presumably, consumate their union.
OK, OK, this film has some of the creepiest sexual undertones this side of Billy Wilder's 1942 directing debut
The Major and the Minor, though instead of Ginger Roger's posing as a 12 year old being the object of Ray Milland's affection, we get a May-December romance between a 35 year old Mark (yeah right, Dick Powell was well over 35) and the 17 year old Susan, which, all in all, is slightly less creepy. Actually, I find it ironic that in this all too permissive era, that a movie like
Susan Slept Here or
The Major and the Minor (despite being made in the more "innocent" 40s and 50s), would generate such a case of moral hysteria if a contemporary film exploring the same subject matter would be made (I guess you can't make jokes about pedophilia and exploiting teenage girls in todays film). The film is frequently hilarious, especially with the bawdy sexual content. Susan is convinced that the police have brought her to Mark's bachelor pad as a "gift" for him, and though she warms up to him, does manage to keep a rolling pin underneath her pillow as she sleeps. Everytime, Isabelle tries to call, Susan answers the phone, and Isabelle expects the worse. Harvey and Virgil basically freak out over Mark's plans, and they point out to the appearance of exploitation. When the brunette wistfully thinks that she should get a dye job to get her hair to match the plantinum blonde Isabelle, Mark says she is a natural blonde saying that he knows "because they are very close friends." (that line got the biggest laugh at the screening). Besides the bizarre sexual undercurrents are again expressed in Susan's dream sequence; Mark is dressed in a sequined blue sailor's outfit, carries Susan in a gilded, bird cage through a pink background, but abandons her when he spies the spidery Isabelle (she is depicted like a black widow, with multiple arms and hands stroking Mark's body). Susan resolves to grow up and woo Mark back; she watches some 8mm home movies, and in a hilarious sequence, mercilessly mocks the silent visage of Isabelle. From these home movies she decides to take lessons in horse-riding and golf (to destructive effects), and "takes up" smoking (she proudly declares she can smoke half a cigarette). There is somewhat of a parallel with Harvey's off-screen daughter, who is growing up too fast for her father's taste, driving him to psychoanalysis; Mark invades one of Harvey's sessions and the doctor helps Mark realize that he loves Susan. After he confesses his love to Susan, and they apparently sleep together, we get another view of Susan's fantasy world, but this time, Mark has joined Susan in her cage; they swing together in apparent post-coital bliss.
Another side note, Tashlin is hilariously disrespectful to Hollywood. A starving Susan spies walnuts on the table and uses the Oscar to crack the shells, Mark protests telling her "not to use the head." In another scene, they watch one of Mark's old movies on TV, and they satirize the sometimes byzantine credits of Hollywood screenwriting; later, Mark mocks his own purple prose as he lip syncs to his the movie dialogue on TV). The whole thing is hilarious.
Susan Slept Here may not have the social bite of
The First Time, but it was a very enjoybale comedy.
I really look forward to more of Tashlin's films, next week is his
Artists and Models.
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