It was a big surprise to discover that Frank Tashlin—the giddily inventive mastermind of such fourth-wall-breaking, pop-culture-pillaging cinematic jack-in-the-boxes as “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?”—may be the primordial Hitchcockian acolyte. His 1964 comedy, “The Disorderly Orderly” (which I discuss in this clip), is perhaps the main piece of evidence. Tashlin had been directing Jerry Lewis since the mid-fifties, casting him as a movie nut in “Hollywood or Bust,” and quickly parodying “Rear Window” with him in “Artists and Models.” When Lewis became a director, he considered Tashlin his mentor, but the two men made different use of the Lewis persona. Lewis, in his own movies (such as his first, “The Bellboy”), is a radical democrat—his eternal child is a beleaguered and overlooked Everyman whose essential decency and value are misunderstood, derided, or ignored in a world of vanity and self-interest. He craves the ordinary life of which others deprive him. For Tashlin, that same outer child is the victim of inner turmoil, of inhibitions and neuroses that thwart his quest for fulfillment and render him unable to fit in. Tashlin’s Jerry is the Hitchcockian innocent thrust into extraordinary circumstances.
P.S. Tashlin was a well-rounded neoclassicist: not only did he make an equally Hitchcockian thriller-spoof, “The Alphabet Murders,” in 1966 (it may well be his stylistic masterwork), but he had also taken on Howard Hawks’s “Bringing Up Baby,” as well as “Vertigo,” in the 1962 comedy “Bachelor Flat.”
