Frank Tashlin's Career Kicked Off on a High Note with The First Time and Ended Bleakly with the Godawful Bob Hope Vehicle The Private Navy of Sgt. O’Farrell
Like Bob Fosse, Frank Tashlin’s legacy and legendary status would be secure even if he’d never contemplated directing a live-action feature film. Where Fosse’s legacy is split between his equally brilliant and influential work as a choreographer and filmmaker, Tashlin is blessed to be a towering giant of both animation and live-action filmmaking.
Alongside simpatico geniuses like Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng and Robert McKimson, Tashlin helped transform the Warner Bros. animation department, self-deprecatingly known as “Termite Terrace,” into the hippest, funniest, smartest and fastest animation hub in the world through his pioneering work in the 1930s and 40s involving American icons like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Tashlin’s particular favorite, Porky Pig.
Even in this esteemed company, Tashlin stood out because of his aspirations to break out of the animation ghetto and establish himself as an A-list director of live-action comedies imbued with the same gleeful anarchy that informed his bite-sized animated masterpieces.
Tashlin succeeded spectacularly, creating a live-action legacy every bit as impressive as his classic cartoons. Tashlin’s career as an auteur began on an auspicious note with the lovely and unexpectedly poignant 1952 comedy The First Time.
Tashlin was a gag man and an idea man above all else. His live-action debut boasts a gimmick as novel as it is adorable: it’s narrated by the fetus and then the baby of middle-class first-time parents Joe (Robert Cummings) and Betsy Bennett (Barbara Hale, who went on to subsequent fame as Perry Mason’s stalwart secretary Della Street) as they struggle with the myriad stresses, pressures and expenses of bringing another life into a world that’s already pretty damn crowded.
Early in the film there is a quietly heart wrenching scene where before she goes to the hospital to deliver, Betsy, overcome with emotion, dictates the terms of her will to her husband. Though The First Time is a comedy from one of the funniest men in film history, the scene isn’t played for laughs, even of the exceedingly dark variety.
The scene is boldly and brilliantly played completely straight, as the very real concerns of a woman worried, not without cause, that she might soon be joining the ranks of women who die during child birth.
By dealing with such somber subject matter right off the bat, The First Time is letting us know that it is going to deal honestly and forthrightly with the very complicated and sometimes dark emotions that come with first-time parenthood. It’s particularly incisive and uncompromising in its depiction of the way that parenthood can put incredible strain on even the healthiest marriages.
That refreshing and unexpected honesty and candor about the endlessly romanticized and sentimentalized subject of babies and early parenthood extends to the film’s clear-eyed take on the financial pressures of adulthood. In a typically droll moment, the baby narrator reflects that his broke daddy paid for the birth of his bouncing baby boy with a bouncing rubber check. If that’s not embarrassing enough, Joe discovers that his dream job as an architect pays him just enough to pay his nanny’s wages, so like many fathers he makes sacrifices for his family at the expense of his pride, his ego, his ambitions, his happiness and his masculinity.
Cummings and Hale have terrific chemistry. They’re equally adept at conveying love and support for each other through the gauntlet of sleepless nights, empty bank accounts and frayed nerves that constitutes a baby’s first year on the planet and the tension and resentment that can threaten to tear newly expanded families apart at a time when they’re most vulnerable.
Joe in particular behaves in ways that are sometimes shocking in their callousness, like when he dresses down his long-suffering wife for not getting herself glammed up for him with a beer in his hand when he gets home from a long, depressing day at a job he hates but no matter how realistically frustrated the couple gets with each other they remain relatable and sympathetic.
For parents, The First Time should be painfully relatable and true to life. In true Frank Tashlin form, it’s not just about being new parents or the first years in a baby’s life. Instead it uses that elegantly minimalist premise to explore just about everything, from relationships to the national mania for selling and buying things to aging to sex to class to family, nuclear and extended.
Tashlin’s first time as a co-writer and director of a live-action feature film was a low-key triumph that’s funny but also surprisingly dark and insightful. Like Vincent Minnelli’s Father of the Bride and Father’s Little Dividend, it’s about the nightmarish underbelly of the American dream, about the ominous shadows the cruelty of capitalism cast over our seemingly idyllic lives as American parents and consumers, trying to keep up with the Joneses and our ever-increasing bills.
The First Time was the first great film Tashlin made as a live-action auteur. Many subsequent masterpieces would follow like Son of Paleface, Susan Slept Here, Artists & Models, The Girl Can’t Help It, Hollywood or Bust and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? But his most important live-action relationship was undoubtedly with human cartoon character and future auteur Jerry Lewis.
In the late 1950s and 1960s, Tashlin was Jerry Lewis’ director of choice before Lewis became his own favored auteur. Tashlin’s track record during this time outside of his work with his Hollywood Bust and Cinderfella leading man was much dicier, and filled with films that failed to find favor with critics or audiences, including the back to back flops Caprice and 1968’s The Private Navy of Sgt. O’Farrell.
Tashlin ended his career on a nadir. The Private Navy of Sgt. O’Farrell, released four years before Tashlin’s death at 59 in 1972, reunited the co-writer-director with Bob Hope, who gave Tashlin his first big cinematic live-action successes with 1951’s The Lemon Drop Kid and 1952’s Son of Paleface.
The pairing of a world-class gag man like Tashlin, who exuded funny from his very pores, and one of our most enduring and beloved funnymen had yielded creative and commercial gold before and helped the pave way for Tashlin’s righteous shift from cartoons to live-action. Unfortunately, Tish Tash, as Tashlin was sometimes known, and Hope got back together during the stage in Hope’s career when Hope was giving "phoning it in" and "barely trying" a bad name.
1968’s The Private Navy of Sgt. O’Farrell finds Bing Crosby’s longtime travel partner distinctly on auto-pilot as the titular soldier, an enterprising hustler in the Mr. Roberts/Sgt. Bilko mold in the early days of World War II who is primarily concerned with locating and and disseminating an alcoholic treasure trove of Pabst Blue Ribbon that went missing after the ship transporting it was shot down.
Poor Jeffrey Hunter is cast in the thankless role of Lyman P. Jones, a descendant of legendary patriot John Paul Jones of “I have not yet begun to fight!” fame. Jones longs to match his ancestor’s fabled eloquence with honeyed words in a very Tashlin running gag that unfortunately never goes anywhere. The same is true of his character’s unlikely romantic dreams about Nurse Nellie Krause (Phyllis Diller), a man-crazy single gal who answers the soldiers’ intense desire for female companionship, or even just women to look at, in a most unexpected and unwanted way yet improbably infiltrates the hunky enlisted man’s romantic fantasies all the same.
The luckless Hunter isn’t given anything to do. He was funnier playing Jesus in the slightly more somber King of Kings and the equally cursed Diller is once again stuck with a role that’s one long, unfunny ugly joke lazily executed. The magic that Diller possessed as a groundbreaking stand-up comedian, that gutsy fearlessness, did not translate on film, where it all too often registered as hokey shtick.
The morale and happiness of our fighting troops overseas obviously was a matter of supreme importance to Hope. The longtime host of the Academy Awards probably did more to entertain and distract our soldiers than any other man in American history yet this comedy about the very troops Hope devoted so much of his life to feels weirdly impersonal. If Hope felt a personal emotional connection to the material it never comes through. It feels like just another interchangeable professional obligation to get through, no different from a variety show or live appearance.
This has the canned, rat-a-tat, laugh-track ready rhythms of one of Hope’s specials only this time instead of entertaining the troops Hope and his collaborators were punishing civilians. The movie has a distinct variety-show, variety-special vibe, only this time instead of awkwardly trading leering banter with Hope, or maybe crooning a duet, sex bomb Gina Lollobrigida plays the star’s sociologist love interest.
This fanciful casting illustrates that Happy Madison productions and sitcoms starring Kevin James or James Belushi do not have a monopoly on the hoary cliche of a schlubby-looking male star, perhaps not coincidentally the biggest name and most powerful person in the cast, being paired with a love interest so impossibly beautiful and glamorous she barely seems to belong to the same species as her less radiant and magnificent male lead.
There’s something almost hypnotic about the awfulness of Bob Hope’s late-period vehicles, with their time-warp squareness and mechanically delivered one-liners. This was 1968. The world was changing in exciting and dramatic and unpredictable ways but Hope and his movies stayed the same. This was particularly true of his movies with Phyllis Diller. Together these two hid away from the turmoil and uncertainty of the time, finding escape in the easy, familiar rhythms of vaudeville and its tacky television descendent, the variety show/special.
In true Tashlin fashion, the characters in Private Navy have little regard for the fourth wall, particularly Hope’s titular huckster. They understand intuitively that they are characters in a movie, and share that knowledge with the audience. When Hope’s character looks at a young Bing Crosby on a movie screen, for example (a Bing Crosby double feature figures prominently in the film’s plot), it’s with the competitive mock-aggravation of a movie star who appeared in a series of buddy movies with the soulful Catholic crooner, not a suspiciously long in the tooth soldier with suspiciously strong opinions about a superstar he does not have a personal relationship with.
When Tashlin’s screenplay lazily coughs up yet another From Here to Eternity parody/homage — complete with Hope clumsily acknowledging that it’s a smirking tribute to an anti-war classic multiple generations undoubtedly know more as a ubiquitous subject of spoof and homage — it’s right up there with 10, Citizen Kane and Patton in the great pantheon of maddeningly over-referenced movies — it just serves as a sad reminder of how far the great had fallen.
The world of wartime opportunism would have been a great one for Tashlin in his prime. It’s tempting to imagine what he’d do in the mid-fifties with a subject like that and someone like Tom Ewell or Tony Randall in the lead, someone young, someone hungry, someone engaged.
The movie Tashlin ended up making doesn’t even have aspirations to satire. Of course Hope was a consummate figure of the establishment and the United States Department of Defense cooperated with filming so it’s not surprising that the movie depicts war less as hell on earth than as kind of boring, especially if you’re in desperate need of a brewski, but really not too bad.
Tashlin made his name as a live-action filmmaker with movies that weren’t just funny but said something, like The First Time. As with his cartoons, they worked on multiple levels, as entertainment but also as social commentary. The Private Navy of Sgt. O’Farrell, in sharp contrast, just wants to eke some mild chuckles out of sitcom-style military hijinks and fails completely. It does not clear even the very low bar it sets for itself.
When comic minds as brilliant as Hope and Tashlin collaborate on a movie without a single laugh, as is the case here, the result is less a comedy than a minor tragedy.
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