Some of my earliest memories revolve around the painted image of a grinning, sick-green, pointy-toothed rat wearing a torn sweatshirt with the letters “R.F.” written on it. Because of this, I am probably the ideal audience for “Tales of the Rat Fink,” a new documentary.
This ramshackle, affectionate movie tells of Rat Fink (the fly-infested rodent designed as the “anti-Mickey Mouse”) and other creations of Ed Roth. Roth, aka “Big Daddy,” was a California artist whose custom car designs helped define the culture of the early 1960s, and whose drawings adorned many a T-shirt.
“Tales” gives us a bit of Roth’s background and then plunges us into the look of the late 1950s, suggesting that Roth’s car designs were a rebuke to the conformity of the era. He became a celebrity when the toy company Revell produced model-car kits of some of his wackiest creations. Who can forget the bubble-top Beatnik Bandit, or the monster-car driver Mr. Gasser?
All right, maybe you had to be there. Clearly, Canadian director Ron Mann (who did the road-tripping documentary about Woody Harrelson, “Go Further”) was there, and he brings all this stuff up with fondness. More fondness than completeness; one would like to know more about the cultural impact of Roth’s work, and what the man himself was up to after the mid-1960s.
Mann takes an appropriately offbeat approach to this. For one thing, Roth, who died in 2001, “narrates” the movie, with the help of John Goodman’s voice.
Also, as we see custom cars of the era, they begin speaking. The voices chosen are well-cast: Brian Wilson is the surfboard-ready Surfite, the Smothers Brothers are a station wagon and trailer, and “American Graffiti” star Paul LeMat is a classic cruisin’ car. Ann-Margret and Jay Leno also chime in, and Tom Wolfe appears (Wolfe wrote about Roth and car culture in his essay “The Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby”).
This device sounds a little better than it plays, but it’s in the spirit of the subject. “Tales of the Rat Fink” gives a short (just over 70 minutes) but pungent introduction to the subject for non-fans, and it’s a nice tribute for the already indoctrinated.
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