Rat Pack Art Criticism

I recently made the wonderful little discovery of this song from a 1955 Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis movie titled Artists and Models:

You can trace the mystery
Of ancient history

Through art of artists and their models

You can comb through the Rome colosseum

And the rear of your nearest museum

There's the Mona Lisa,
The Tower of Pisa

A cowhand's daughter out in Texas

And there's modern art to see

That makes you wonder

What the heck it’s meant to be

On the streets of Murmark
There's a fancy kind of art
That is strictly for the tourists from the sticks

And those wise Greenwich guys
Really open up your eyes
Painting portraits of their pretty little chicks

So to each creator and imitator
Who daubs and dabbles with the brushes

To the guys that draw their bunnies
Or the Sunday morning funnies

And brighten up the world today

And to every girl that poses
To every Grandma Moses

We like to tip the old beret

Martin plays a struggling comic book artist and Lewis plays a children’s book writer obsessed with comic books. The movie also stars Shirley MacLaine as Bessie Sparrowbush, a model for a comic book heroine called Bat Lady. The director Frank Tashlin wrote comics himself in the 1940s and apparently includes plenty of comic-related gags as well as some social commentary about the censorship issues of the 1950s surrounding the The Seduction of the Innocent controversy and resulting Comics Code. Pop Art also gets the treatment. (Some great stills from the movie are here.)

I’m not usually a Martin-Lewis fan, but this looks like one to check out, at least once Netflix starts carrying it.