An Overdue Tribute to a Forgotten Film Master : Movies: Director Frank Tashlin achieved great success in the ‘50s, but he is largely overlooked today. A UCLA series revives his films, beginning Thursday.

Jerry Lewis called him Teacher, and Porky Pig might have done the same. Filmmakers as different as Jean-Luc Godard, Joe Dante, Wim Wenders, Robert Zemeckis and Eric Rohmer learned from him. His films defined the ‘50s in all their crassness and exuberance.

Yet director Frank Tashlin is virtually forgotten today, even in Europe, where his critical reputation was born. The tribute to Tashlin beginning Thursday at UCLA’s Melnitz Hall heralds a long-overdue revival.

Tashlin was a very talented man, and that has been part of the problem. A moving target for cultural historians, Tashlin was a newspaper cartoonist, a director of animated cartoons, a screenwriter, a playwright, a film director, a television director and the creator of two beautiful children’s books about animals made unhappy by contact with human society, “The Bear That Wasn’t” and “The Possum That Didn’t.”

Born in New Jersey in 1913, Tashlin began working as an animator in New York at age 17 and three years later moved to California to work for “Looney Tunes” producer Leon Schlesinger. For the next decade he worked off and on for Schlesinger, joining him in 1942 at Warner Bros., where Tashlin directed such gems as “Booby Hatched” and “The Stupid Cupid.”

In between stints with Schlesinger, he made uncredited contributions to a number of classic Walt Disney cartoons, and while working at Screen Gems he wrote and directed “The Fox and the Grapes,” an updated Aesop’s fable that anticipates the Sisyphean rhythms of Chuck Jones’ Road Runner films.

In 1945, Tashlin, who had always wanted to work in features, began writing for the Marx Brothers, Eddie Bracken and Bob Hope. It was Hope who gave Tashlin his first shot at directing when he asked him to re-shoot several scenes of “The Lemon Drop Kid” because the credited director had not done justice to Tashlin’s script. “The First Time,” a corrosive comedy about having a baby, was the beginning of an unbroken succession of films he co-wrote and directed between 1952 and 1958.

Commercially and artistically, Tashlin was on a roll. By the mid-’50s he was in such demand that he could move easily between Paramount, the home of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and Fox, the home of Jayne Mansfield. In one three-year period he directed “Artists and Models” and “Hollywood or Bust,” the last and best of the Martin-Lewis vehicles, and two films with Mansfield: “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” and “The Girl Can’t Help It,” a rollicking satire on rock ‘n’ roll featuring performances by legends such as Gene Vincent and Fats Domino.

These were the films that inspired Jean-Luc Godard to write in the Cahiers du Cinema: “Henceforth, when you talk about a comedy, don’t say, ‘It’s Chaplinesque’; say, loud and clear, ‘It’s Tashlinesque.’ ”

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What, exactly, is “Tashlinesque”? The subject will be explored at UCLA in a lecture and panel discussion, but there is a simple explanation. Tashlin cut his teeth on cartoons, and when he moved into live action, he re-created the “Looney Tunes” universe by dressing his flesh-and-blood actors like cartoon characters, surrounding them with blaring colors and embroiling them in elaborate gags that sent the laws of physics out the window.

Heading west through the desert in “Son of Paleface,” Bob Hope passed through an icy mirage and emerged with two penguins for stowaways. A floating vacuum cleaner in “Who’s Minding the Store?” sucked up the contents of a department store and explodes. In Tashlin’s hands, the film medium unblushingly calls attention to itself and even pokes fun at its most dangerous rival: “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” sports commercials under the credits, and in “The Disorderly Orderly” a TV set unleashes a blizzard in a hospital.

Gags like these demanded collaborators with distinctive visual personalities, something of which there was no shortage in ‘50s Hollywood. The similarities between flesh-and-blood Mansfield and her animated predecessor, Petunia Pig in “Porky’s Romance,” confirm critic Andrew Sarris’ observation that if Mansfield hadn’t existed, Tashlin would have invented her. In “The Girl Can’t Help It,” as Little Richard sings the title tune, Mansfield sashays past a milkman who clutches two bottles of milk to his bosom in rapt contemplation, and the lids blow off the bottles.

More revered than imitated in Europe, Tashlin is also the spiritual father of a whole generation of American directors whose work was decisively influenced by the cartoons of their childhood: Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Robert Zemeckis, Joe Dante and Tim Burton, another Hollywood filmmaker who began his career as a cartoonist. At a time when “The Flintstones” and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” reincarnate classic cartoons or fuse them with live action, Tashlin has more than one lesson to teach us.

“I know from trying to do it in my own films that one of the hardest things is to make cartoon gags work in live action,” says Joe Dante, whose most “Tashlinesque” films are “Gremlins” and its sequel. “For my money, Tashlin’s films are unique. There wasn’t anybody else who was able to do that kind of outrageous gag as successfully as he did.”

As important as his technique was Tashlin’s moral sense, which has been a subject of dispute ever since Andrew Sarris taxed the director with vulgarity in a much-quoted article. “I don’t know where the pejorative is here,” replies Dante to that charge. “If you can present a cruel and vulgar world in a way that makes it a little bigger than life, so that you can laugh at it, I think that robs it of its personal insult quality.”

Although critics at the time rarely noted it, Tashlin was a satirist whose main source of inspiration was the contemporary world. Rohmer dubbed him “the foremost caricaturist of the screen,” a compliment worth recalling at a time when Tashlin’s descendants often succumb to the delights of cartoon illogic and exaggeration as an escape from reality.

For director Peter Bogdanovich, Tashlin viewed in the context of his era was not excessive: “He was honest, exaggerating only slightly to make a point,” writes Bogdanovich in a forthcoming book of director interviews where Tashlin rubs shoulders with the likes of Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. Many intelligent people felt like outsiders in the ‘50s, and the best Tashlin films, whose heroes turn their backs on society’s follies without any hope of changing them, are already situated on the cusp of the ‘60s.

Madison Avenue was a favorite target for critics of the American way of life in this transitional period, so it is not surprising that Tashlin’s masterpiece, “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?,” is a Faustian fable set in the world of advertising. Famous for 15 minutes because everyone thinks he is having an affair with a movie star, ad executive Rock Hunter (Tony Randall) rejects the false values he has spent a lifetime selling and retires to the country with his true love to raise chickens.

More radical solutions would be proposed in the next decade, but by the late ‘60s, Tashlin had stopped making films, even though the series of films he directed starring Jerry Lewis were commercial successes. Perhaps he was not made for those times.

But during his own dazzling ascent as a Hollywood director, he created a legacy that wedded high style with irreverent social comment in a way that has become a lost art. That legacy has marked film history, and is eminently worth rediscovering.

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A Tribute to Frank Tashlin

The Frank Tashlin retrospective screens at the Melnitz Theater, northeast corner of UCLA campus, near the intersection of Sunset and Hilgard, Westwood. Tickets are $5 regular admission, $3 for students and the elderly; matinees $3, and 50 cents for students and the elderly.

Artists and Models and The Girl Can’t Help It, Thursday, 7:30 p.m.

Hollywood or Bust and Rock-a-Bye Baby, Saturday, 7:30 p.m.

Marry Me Again and Susan Slept Here, Sunday, 7 p.m.

A program of Warner Bros. cartoons with Cinderfella, Jan. 28 at 2 p.m.

Son of Paleface and The Private Navy of Sergeant O’Farrell, Jan. 29 at 7 p.m.

The Disorderly Orderly and Who’s Minding the Store? on Feb. 7 at 7:30 p.m.

Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and The Alphabet Murders on Feb. 11 at 7:30 p.m.

Warner Bros. cartoons and The Geisha Boy on Feb. 12 at 7:30 p.m., and The Glass Bottom Boat and Caprice on Feb. 12 at 7 p.m.