Early Sixties Silliness:
Frank Tashlin’s Bachelor Flat and The Man from the Diner’s Club
The Frank Tashlin retrospective continued last night with two of Tashlin’s lesser known comedies from the 1960s,
Bachelor Flat(1962) and
The Man from the Diner’s Club(1963); the former film was a enjoyable comic farce, the later an amusing, at best, minor work.
Bachelor Flat tells the story of Bruce Patterson (Terry Thomas), a visiting Professor of Archaeology from England, who teaches at California University. Unfailingly polite and reserved, Patterson’s English charms have apparently entranced every woman in Southern California. According to the film, the reason’s for this attraction is long and historical; the film opens with a prologue depicting Paul Revere’s ride through the New England countryside. As Revere gallops off, a colonial woman comes to the gabled window and beckons her lover, a British redcoat (also played by Terry Thomas) to her window. Scaling the trestles, he woos her romantically, aided by his accent, good manners, and politeness (he produces two cups of already brewed tea from his tri-corner hat), much to the consternation of her minuteman husband (played by Richard Beymer, of
West Side Story and
Twin Peaks fame; Beymer is also featured in the film as the character Mike Polaski, who, incidentally, also narrates the film). Even after shooting the redcoat in the back, the rash American still loses his lady to the Englishman, aided by a knock on the head by a catapulted rock.
Cut to the credits sequence, Prof. Patterson drives to class in his imported, English car, impeccably dressed in a three-piece suit, wearing a hat, and carrying an umbrella, even though it is consistently sunny in Southern California. Along the route, every woman stops to say hello, wave, or just stare dreamily (as all of the men look dismayed). In one particularly comic shot, the camera is positioned behind a low wall and hedgerow, peering out towards the street, as Patterson traverses the length of the Cinemascope frame in his car. As Patterson enters the frame screen left, a series of woman’s arms extend upwards, waving to him, all of the way across the screen. This is only the beginning, as Tashlin makes brilliant comic use of the Cinemascope frame throughout
Bachelor Flat, especially later in the film when a dachshund, drags, pushes, and even rides a dinosaur bone, ten times it’s size across the beach; Tashlin repeatedly sets up the gag by having the dog enter screen left and slowly exit screen right; another comic usage occurs in a dream sequence, as Prof. Patterson has a nightmare, Tashlin keeps both the dreaming Patterson and the dream sequence within the same frame, “Don’t Kill Mr. Blubber!!!” ok, ok, you have to see the movie to get that joke.
In Prof. Patterson’s class, which is must have a women to men ration of 10:1, all of the gum smacking coeds are preening themselves in the mirror. One of the coeds, listening to radio learns of Patterson’s engagement to a famous fashion designer, Helen Bushmill. That same coed decides that all of the woman will have to draw straws to decide who is going to kill Ms. Bushmill. Prof. Patterson intercedes, and we learn that Helen is currently in Paris.
Prof. Patterson lives in a swanky beach house in Malibu, that he rents from Helen. His neighbor, Mike Polanski, a law student, lives in a trailer with his dachshund, Jessica. Patterson’s bachelor pad is invaded by Libby (Tuesday Weld), Helen’s daughter from a previous marriage, a marriage that Patterson is completely unaware of. Libby, who ran away from boarding school, is shocked to find a naked, middle-aged Englishman in her mother’s shower and tries to run away, but she is stopped when Mike comes into the house to return the telephone and get himself a drink. Libby hides in the liquor cabinet
, as Mike and Prof. Patterson talk. Mike has a hot date with a girl named Gladys, and the Professor is off to a dinner party with a rival archaeologist, Dr. Bowman; the two are in a friendly competition for a digging grant, which Patterson hopes to use to find the rest of a dinosaur skeleton, the thigh bone of which he recently found (and which Jessica is instantly attracted to).
Eventually, Mike leaves, and Patterson finds Libby hiding in the delivery crate that the dinosaur bone came in. Initially he calls the police, since he thinks she is one of his crazed students, and stuff like this has happened before. To stay in the house, she invents the story that she is a runaway juvenile delinquent, and kind of blackmails the goodhearted Prof. Patterson, who is all worried about propriety. Then Gladys enters the picture, a curvaceous young woman who also desires to seduce Prof. Patterson (her funniest scene in the movie actually occurs later, when she is on a vibrating massage table, jiggling around in her lingerie trying to eat a slice of chocolate cake), and dates Mike only as a pretense to get close to the Professor. What ensues is a classic, door-slamming farce (literally, poor Mike gets his nose smashed in by the slamming bedroom door several times) as the increasingly beleaguered Prof. Patterson has to hide Libby and Gladys in his bedroom, from each other, from Mike, and eventually from a LA County Sheriff who responded to the Professor’s earlier call.
After Patterson rushes her out, he goes to the dinner party (where he acts nervously attracting the suspicion of Dr. Bowman, who thinks he found something really big in an unexpected place), and returns home to find Libby sleeping in his bed. He sleeps outside, and she makes him breakfast. When Mike comes around he panics, pushes her inside with her breakfast tray, and clutches two saucer lids to his chest; it’s a sight gag that looks like Patterson is palming two tremendous breasts. It’s is sort of like the milk jug gag in
The Girl Can’t Help It, just more examples of Tashlin’s bawdy (some would say vulgar, but I’m OK with that) humor. John Williams, who wrote the score for the film, credited as Johnny Williams, said this about his score, "Lots of brass chords on cuts to brassieres — that sort of thing."
Later, Mike finds out about Libby when he spies her underwear drying on a shutter and mistakes them for Gladys’s. Of course, he goes “nutty” for her right from the start. Even though the Professor tries to turn Libby into the police station, since it is the right thing to do (she cries, kisses him on the cheek, and calls him “Daddy,” before going into the police station; it’s one of the film’s more tender moments, another occurs when Libby is going through a chest in the attic; Mike spies on her and sees her fondly remembering a childhood rag doll; again showing that Tashlin had much more range than just a comic director), and is “rescued,” by Mike, Libby ends up living in the beach house with Prof. Patterson, and begins falling for Mike (which brings out the fatherly protectiveness of Prof. Patterson, in one scene he rebukes Mike as a womanizing cad who preys on young girls), and vice versa, though he catches onto her story after watching a particularly bad movie on TV that Libby parroted.
In the meanwhile, Prof. Patterson must fend off suspicious Dr. Bowman as well as the increasingly aggressive suggestions of various women, including Gladys, his neighbor (who bends over the hood of his car in a bikini), and his crazy student from the beginning of the film. Also, Jessica steals the before mentioned dinosaur bone in the film’s most hilarious moment, forcing Patterson and Mike to go on a beach front scavenger hunt for the buried bone, which in turns leads Dr. Bowman to conclude that Patterson found the bone on the beach. In Paris, Helen confides to her suave Gallic artist friend Paul, that she worries about telling Patterson about Libby (desiring her, he decides to follow her back to the US). Tired of fending off the various aggressive American women, Patterson takes Mike’s advice, telling him to be aggressive himself and pursue the girls instead of letting himself be pursued. To effect this Dr. Jeckyll-Mr. Hyde like transformation, Mike gets Patterson blind, stinking drunk. The site of a drunk, pantless Englishman maniacally wielding an umbrellas does the trick, as the horny satyr alienates all of the pursuing women by chasing them up and down the beach. Unfortunately, this also includes Helen, who had just returned home. Despite the protestations of Mike, she can not abide what Patterson has become, since she fell in love with the shy, reserved Englishman.
Mike decides to help the professor, with Gladys’s help. Of course, he is hindered by a still drunk Prof. Patterson, who is in some sort of catatonic stupor. Helen is eating dinner with Libby and Paul, expressing her heartbreak, when Patterson arrives. He just kinds of stands there at the door, with a blank, yet bemused look on his face. Helen yells at him and slams the door, but then there is a thunderclap and the sound of pouring rain. She opens the door again to the see the blankly smiling Englishman standing under his umbrellas. Her love rejuvenated by his quintessential Englishness, he rushes out to him, followed by Libby (now forming a proper family unit), then followed by Mike who professes his love for Libby as they kiss. The plot wraps itself up in a nice bow: the Professor and Helen marry, and he gets his digging grant (finding the rest of the skeleton), Gladys and Paul meet and fall in love, and even Dr. Bowman has a happy ending, instead of finding dinosaur bones on the Malibu beach, he strikes oil, which rushes up in a geyser, the last image of the film.
have less to say about
The Man from the Diner’s Club, which was the first film of the Tashlin retrospective that was not co-written by Tashlin himself (it was actually written by Bill Blatty, better known as William Blatty, the writer of the
The Exorcist), and the first disappointment. The film is notable for two things, one, it was Danny Kaye’s last starring role in a feature film, and two, it must have been Telly Savalas’s first relationship with the Diner’s Club card, possibly shedding new light on his 1980s pitchman status. Basically, Kaye is a neurotic, anxiety-ridden milquetoast who works for the Diner’s Club, approving or rejecting applicants. Telly Savalas is Ronald “Foots” Purlados, a gangster up on tax evasion charges, who needs cash to flee the country and fake his own death (of course, do to that he needs to find some one whose left foot is an inch longer than the right one, and of course Danny Kaye’s character fits the bill); his ex-stripped girlfriend applies for a Diner’s Club card, and Kaye’s character accidentally approves the card. Kaye is scheduled to marry his fiancee the next day, but to keep his job, and save his wedding, he has to secretly recover the mistakenly issued card. To do so, he gets a job at Purlados’s health club (they hire him so they can use him to fake Purlados’s death), and tries to balance this scheme with his wedding preparations. Wackiness ensues, which is unfortunately only fitfully amusing, and much of that humor depends on how funny you think Danny Kaye’s twitching neurotic actually is.
The film has Tashlin’s typical satire of 50s and 60s American culture, but with a broader brush and less effect (Tashlin’s best work is weighted towards the end when he orchestrates a bunch of comic, slapstick chases, but when I think of slapstick I normally don’t think of Danny Kaye). The office workers work in a sterile environment and march out to coffee and lunch breaks on cue, while the beatniks that Kaye stumbles upon (led by a scruffy Harry Dean Stanton; these beatniks actually are quite funny) rebel against everything, spout bad poetry, and are accompanied incessantly by bongos, even after they’ve been thrown in jail. Kaye’s anxiety is actually caused by the massive bleeping and blinking computer which takes up the entire room behind him (he confesses to Lucy that when he was a kid, the machinery of a foundry near his home drove him to distraction, so we got a man alienated by the modern industrial world, that’s kind of interesting); it’s no machine Moloch from
Metropolis or mind-numbing assembly line from
Modern Times, but Tashlin does score some comic points with the massive contraption, which, after Kaye tries to use it, spits out a blizzard of thousands upon thousands of computer punch-cards (a gag reprised at the end of the film). Purlados constantly complains about highway safety, especially after his first replacement “body” is killed in a car crash. Other targets include the absurd exercise equipment in the gym (fat people being jiggled in various ways), and of course, credit cards; well, actually, the satire of credit cards is kind of soft-pedaled, which isn’t surprising since Diner’s Club probably had something to do with the movie, though it was funny when Kaye’s boss rebukes him for paying for lunch with cash.
Like in
Bachelor Flat, the film ties itself up nicely (Kaye captures Purlados, gets a promotion to company detective, and gets married), it was just too bad the movie wasn’t better, though it was light and amusing.
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