In the 1950s, American culture suddenly blew up. Cinemascope doubled the size of movie screens, televisions burst into living rooms everywhere, comic books were a four-colored geyser drowning the newsstand under hundreds of titles, rock ‘n' roll came screaming out of nowhere to own the airwaves, and Hollywood went crazy for epics: Biblical epics, Western epics, musical epics. What motion pictures needed was a plussized director who could stand up to this mushroom cloud of pop culture; what they got was animator-turnedgagman Frank Tashlin.

Film historians like to say that Tashlin, who will be remembered with a weeklong retrospective beginning tonight at Film Forum, directed his cartoons like live action and his live action like cartoons. It's hard to argue when confronted with his characters, who spurt steam out of their ears, address the camera like a best friend, and break the laws of physics like pretzel sticks.

Tashlin, a native of Weehawken, N.J., got his start animating "Looney Tunes" in the early 1940s before becoming the go-to guy for comedy as one of the few directors to successfully make the transition from animation to live-action, shaping star vehicles for one outsized celeb after another: Bob Hope, Jayne Mansfield and, most famously, Jerry Lewis. But it was the way he depicted the modern world — in the broad, dynamic strokes of a cartoonist — that made him the quintessential director of the 1950s. Let other men dabble with wordplay, double entendre, and irony. Tashlin was in it for the sight gag, the prop comedy, and the wolf whistle.

Nowhere is his love of scale more obvious than in his best movie, "Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?" (1957), which kicks off with the 20th Century Fox logo looming ominously over the audience as Tony Randall performs the studio's theme tune in a frenetic oneman-band down in a corner of the screen.

Ad man Rockwell Hunter (Randall) lusts for the key to the executive washroom, but the Stay-Put lipstick account is leaving and everyone at his firm is facing the axe. In a fit of desperation he forges a deal with the devil: Movie queen Rita Marlowe (Jayne Mansfield) will endorse Stay-Put if he pretends to be her unlikely loverboy; the publicity will be good for her and her endorsement will keep Stay-Put put. The moral of the movie, not quite as cheery as the sight gags, is that success is the source of all human misery. It was the first film to reveal the dirty little secret behind modern day show biz: Content is what comes between commercials. Crammed with fabulous '50s furniture, featuring Mansfield squeaking and whinnying like a deflating helium balloon, and overflowing with a roaring, red-blooded sexuality, "Will Success" shades its Technicolor surfaces with the grim futility of human folly.This from the same man who wrote a children's book (his last of four, not surprisingly) suggesting that a nuclear holocaust was an appropriate solution for the problems of society.

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