In the company of Artists and Models, his fifth film as a director after a long career as a cartoonist, Frank Tashlin begins a short streak of movies that remain milestones of mid-century Technicolor exuberance. Tashlin has a flair for colours, props, gadgets, anatomical gags – and a sharp instinct for turning them into cultural symptoms. Of 1950s American dreams he captures the irresistible and the monstrous; the symptoms he most loves to explore are advertising, television, rock music, Jayne Mansfield, and Jerry Lewis. Compared to the biting satire of The Girl Can’t Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, both tighter and more explosive films – Artists and Models (a tale of broke wannabes in the Hollywood village) has a kind of archaic, apparent innocence. Provided, of course, that we can still decently call “innocent” the parody of an adult man with the brain of a six-yearold. “It’s because of the comics,” Jerry admits, eyes and knees crossed, in spastic contortions, lisping his way through the “imbecility sunk to the height of genius”, as Raymond Durgnat put it. (Are we sure, under today’s codes, that all this is still acceptable? Haven’t vaguer infractions been branded beyond redemption?) As always, Tashlin strikes the iron while it’s hot. In 1954, Seduction of the Innocent had come out – a bestseller in which psychiatrist Fred Wertham attacked crime comics as corruptors of young American minds and inciters of violent acts. (Here, a brat bites a publisher’s finger). Jerry is a compulsive reader of the genre, idolises a Bat Lady, and at night suffers nightmares filled with extraterrestrial creatures, which the sly Dean Martin dutifully jots down to sell the next day. These are the kinds of guys we’re dealing with – and how two lovely women, the faux-icy Dorothy Malone and the true oddball Shirley MacLaine, could want to marry them remains a mystery. But as the redundant colour palette cuts sharply to two virginal wedding dresses, everyone sings that “every ending is a happy ending, if you’re willing to pretend” – so Tashlin abruptly snaps the book shut, and even this American mystery has got its answer.

Paola Cristalli