THE T. V. AND FRANK TASHLIN!

THE GIRL CAN’T HELP IT! has a famous opening credits scene. Tom Ewell walks up to the audience (as orchestra tune up their instruments) and breaks the “fourth wall” and talks about the film that we are about to see.

Now here’s a shot from later in the film when Eddie Cochran performs Twenty Flight Rock on TV.

Tom Ewell of course has briefly been blessed with the superpower of adding the extra ‘Scope space on both sides and changing the monochrome to “stunning life-like colour from De Luxe”.

Eddie Cochran can’t do that. He’s stuck on TV, the cabinet doors reminding the people in the living room about the off-screen space which a movie theatre does not need to worry about it, because it’s so big while the pictures on TV are so small. So Poor Eddie needs a medium shot. It doesn’t make a great difference but at least it’s something.


In Fats Murdoch’s first scene, he shows of his private movie screen and compares it to television, only “with no commercials”. On this matter at least, Marty Murdoch has good taste. Interestingly when Fats Murdoch asks Mousie(Henry Jones in a great comic performance) to turn on the projector, here’s how Tashlin cuts to him.

Mousie shut up in the projection room looking out of a box. Mousie looks like he’s trapped on TV. The shadow of the viewspace on the top of almost makes the image look like a monitor projection. It also brings to mind Tashlin’s succeeding film, WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER where Tony breaks the fourth wall(and in the middle of the narrative) to illustrate how tiny TV space actually is. (That effect of course doesn’t come off when seen on home video.)

The arrival of television in the 1950s provoked many films to examine the effect of TV on the audience. Jonathan Rosenbaum noted that WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER did not differentiate between TV and advertising and that’s pretty much what Elia Kazan(A FACE IN THE CROWD), George Cukor(IT SHOULD HAPPEN TO YOU), Gene Kelly-Stanley Donen(IT’S ALWAYS FAIR WEATHER) examine in detail and with considerable freshness and vitality. Yet Tashlin alone works the effect of the mere presence of TV in the living room into his aesthetic choices. The detail of the cabinet doors slanted frontally in the Eddie Cochran still is a striking example. Another striking one is the introduction of Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps in their rehearsal performance in a building.

Here it’s a camera peering into a window. The performance is a rehearsal and not a live one like Eddie Cochran. Of course for purposes of promoting the Blue Caps, they are all arranged and comported as if they’re performing to an audience(which they are, us) rather than the looser body posture one finds in rehearsals or in recording sessions(take a look at how calm and relaxed the Rolling Stones are in Godard’s 1+1/Sympathy for the Devil). The framings once again recall the opening scene, the sides are covered with bricks, and the walls are lobbed by the window curtain.

All this may not mean that Tashlin was necessarily an avid TV viewer but, rather, his films are able to explore or be transparent about how mass media images function and work. The Blue Caps may ostensibly be rehearsing amongst themselves but they are transparently performing for the camera. Which makes their appearance in the film more in line with the function of today's music videos than the other performers in the movie.

On the other hand, there is Little Richard’s number in the nightclub where he gives an electric performance of Ready Teddy. Of course this too is part of the same image-making and image-selling function but the effect is not the same. Because Little Richard and his band are natural performers and they feed off the energy around them.

And when he takes a bow at the end of the performance like an opera conductor, it registers as more authentic and more cinematic, and Tashlin accords him complete dynamic space, carefully arranging the band in the background, the audience on the left and the right and the grand piano in the centre which is strangely enough not coded with the pink and blue colours of the décor. It’s lit from above with a separate lamp and we see the brown wood of the piano shine like a sore thumb in the gaudy Las Vegas aesthetic of the club.