Word: tashlin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...kinship to George Axelrod's play of the same name, this Success, a happy direct descendant of custard-pie slapstick, is one of the silliest strings of sight-and-sound gags ever to jounce through the sober inhibitions of staid latter-day Hollywood. Producer-Director-Writer Frank Tashlin, a onetime Disney cartoonist and sketching fabulist (The Bear That Wasn't), plays the yarn strictly for laughs...
...zany that nobody will pay the least attention to the screen credits. Success roars onward, steadily more outrageous, shamelessly promoting forthcoming Fox movies (Peyton Place, Kiss Them for Me) and donating scads of free ad space to Trans World Airlines. This seems very obnoxious until it grows clear that Tashlin is shrewdly snickering at TV's own annoying tradition of the gratuitous plug ("Yessiree, made it to this here studio on time again today-good old Minute Minder watches...
...Tashlin tells the story of the world that was created, "brand-new, bright, and shiny," and the first two people on it, a 20th century man and woman. From here he traces man's evolution to "the Age of Civilization," where all men wear fig leaves and live in the Garden of Eden...
...text, alone, sounds plausible enough. "Man discovered the wheel," says Tashlin, but in the middle of a double page spread of havoc on a street corner where undertakers give bargain sales on coffins and ambulance drivers count victims on adding machines...
...rest of the story, how man discovered the atom bomb and began to think and then DID something about it, is as delightful as it is simple. Tashlin has taken an old idea and given it his own special poke, which makes The World That Isn't laughable, believable, and desirable...