Rosenbaum on Rushmore

(Which is Wes Anderson's best film? Which is his funniest? I'm not sure if his best is his funniest or if his funniest is his best.)

But RUSHMORE is great. Jonathan Rosenbaum asks us link to his review.

Ginger Rogers

The Laughs

by Dan Callahan

For something in a movie to provoke me to laughter, I have to be taken by surprise in some way. With outright comedians like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, Mae West, Jack Benny, and some of the modern stand-up comedians, I find myself reveling in their personas and even their philosophical implications, but they seldom make me laugh. Yet when I’m watching a newspaper movie, a society melodrama, or even a heavy drama, an actor or actress can deliver a line and have me on the floor laughing with some unexpected little explosion of meaning.
An example: In the middle of a colorful crime film called Blood on the Sun (1945), Sylvia Sidney sorrowfully notes that in Japan, women are not allowed to think. James Cagney gives her a quick look and cracks, “They must bootleg a thought every now and then.” I roared at that, not because the line is particularly funny, but because Cagney delivers it with just the right amount of pretention-puncturing sass and it came as a shock because I was expecting that the movie was meant to be entirely or only serious.
This kind of wisecrack was a thirties staple that gradually got phased out after World War Two. It has seldom been revived, except as deadpan nineties slacker sarcasm, which reflects a sense of powerlessness, while the thirties wisecrack has an up-with-people, aggressive, positive energy. Its proponents included Cagney, his frequent film partner, Joan Blondell, Glenda Farrell, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Eve Arden, and, supremely, Ginger Rogers in Stage Door (1937), who manages to meld thirties wisecrack/nineties sarcasm into a wary, sexy and frankly anti-social package that to me is the ultimate in screen comedy.

The grotesque is an anything but easy genre. It requires sensitivity rather than intelligence, so many of the smartest directors come to grief with it. No chance of cheating here, of escaping into the ivory tower of the misunderstood....

The Lieutenant Wore Skirts, in the style of Voltaire's Candide or Hitchcock's Rich and Strange, recounts the misadventures of a couple of idiots who are brought by too much love to domestic squabble and then to the point of break-up. Imagine Bécassine and the silliest boy you can think of trying to prove they love each other and only succeeding in hating each other. Happiness is not gay, says Max Ophuls; because gaiety is the opposite of happiness, caps Tashlin. Artists and Models does nothing to give him the lie. No film could be more devastating, more bitter in its humor, more brackish, with the richness of the invention constantly aggravated by the poverty of the situations, with the uneasy spectator at first forcing an unwilling laugh, then feeling ashamed, laughing again mechanically, seized in a pitiless mesh of imbecilities, and ending by roaring with laughter because it isn’t funny at all. It is, in other words, an acme of stupidity, but an acme in the same way as Bouvard et Pecuchet.

But to get back to our starting-point. With Tashlin there is no starting-point, and this is precisely his originality. Only the point of arrival matters, a scene at the very limits of absurdity in the ferociously eccentric world of the Pim, Pam, Poum of our childhood.

It is easy to see that Tashlin fondly remembers the Lubitsch of Cluny Brown and To Be or Not To Be. American comedy is dead? So be it.

Long live American comedy.


-Jean-Luc Godard
Cahiers du Cinema
August-September 1956