"Like Moliere, Jacques Becker died on a strange and terrible battlefield: that of artisitic creation. It was the moment when Caroline bites her finger till she draws blood because she has left Edouard, when Golden Marie (Cristobal's Gold, or course) forces back her tears as Manda climbs the scaffold. It was Saturday evening. The studio phoned to say that the mixing of LE TROU was finally complete. Our btoher Jacques breathed again. Mortally wounded for so long, he could now give up the struggle without dishonour. And a few minutes later, Jacques Becker was no longer alive. It was Sunday morning, the hour when Max plays his favourite record, when Lupin meets the Princess at Maxim's when day finally dawns over 7 rue de l'Estrapade.

"There are several good ways of making French films. Italian style, like Renoir. Viennese, like Ophuls. New Yorker, like Melville. But only Becker was and is French as France, French as Fontenelle's rose and Bonnot's gang. I happened to meet him during the sound mixing of LE TROU. Already ill, he was more handsome than ever. He talked about Les Trois Mousquetaires and suddenly I understood. That dark moustache, than grey hair ... he was D'Artagnan in Twenty Years After. And he was Lupin too. Just compare a photograph of Becker seated behind the wheel of his Mercedes with the opening shot of LES AVENTURES DE ARSENE LUPIN and you will see that Robert Lamoureux was his spitting image.

"So Jacques Lupin, alias Artagnan Becker, is dead. Let us pretend to be moved, for we know from LE TESTAMENT D'ORPHEE that poets only pretend to die."

~ Jean-Luc Godard, Cahiers du Cinema 106, April 1960. Quoted in Godard on Godard, translated and edited by Tom Milne.

[Includes references to Becker's EDOUARD ET CAROLINE (1951), L'OR DU CRISTOBAL (1940), CASQUE D'OR (1952), TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI (1954), LES AVENTURES D'ARSENE LUPIN (1957), RUE DE L'ESTRAPADE (1953). Becker was planning a film of Dumas' The Three Musketeers.]

Surprisingly emotional stuff from Godard, I thought. And a reminder that I need to take a look at some of the Becker films lurking in my collection. I saw TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI back in the '80s, I think, but don't remember a thing. But I love that feeling of watching a long-forgotten movie and feeling it all come back.

"The better I know the cinema, the more I realize that it is an art which it is dangerous to take too lightly, even if one is working in comedy. Consequently I become more and more serious with each film. For instance, whereas one of my first successes, SON OF PALEFACE, contained 2,857 gags at a conservative estimate, there were only 1,538 in ARTISTS AND MODELS and 743 in THE GIRL CAN'T HELP IT. As for WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER?, it will have barely 50. Don't worry, it will still be the funniest film of the year."

~ Frank Tashlin, in a letter to Jean-Luc Godard, quoted in Godard on Godard, translated and edited by Tom Milne.

Are those figures accurate? Did Tashlin really count the gags in his scripts? Fellow animators in his cartooning days recalled him visiting silent Chaplin shorts with a little notebook to jot down the gags in, something Tashlin hotly denied, but maybe there was an anal-retentive streak in him somewhere that would account for this obsessiveness.

But as for limiting the gags in WSSRH? to "barely fifty" -- by my count Tash is halfway there by the end of the credit sequence. It's certainly one of the few films to begin with a gag before the studio logo is even off the screen (Tony Randall is seen playing all the instruments in the 20th century Fox fanfare.)

Then there's the tricky question of what exactly is a gag and what is not? Tony Randall dressing in the outsize clothes of hulking hunk Mickey Hargitay is arguably a gag, but his Frankenstein walk once he's wearing them, which is way funnier, is arguably just performance. Tony Randall constantly blurs this line, getting some of his funniest effects from straight lines and reactions. "Like a comic machine," Tashlin told Peter Bogdanovitch.

Tash goes on to say ~

"There is a sacrosanct tradition in Hollywood that the producer should always take precedence over director and scriptwriter. Well, I have decided to upset this status quo by reversing the classification. If WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER? is a big success, I shall be proudest of my script, then of my direction, and last of all of having produced it."

I think Tashlin the producer deserves more credit, as among the best things a producer can do is give freedom to the writer and director while critiquing their work, helping them to identify problems and encouraging them overcome them. I bet Tashlin the producer performed those roles admirably for Tashlin the writer and Tashlin the director.

(Thanks to Brandon for the Tony Randall image!)