Blazing Saddles
Renaissance Comedy
As unlikely as the whole thing seems, we are undergoing something of a Mel Brooks renaissance. The overwhelming success of the Broadway version of The Producers is sparking renewed interest in Brooks, who had all but been run out of Hollywood because of the lackluster performance of his latest movies. The success of The Producers and its haul of Tony Awards marks one of the most unlikely entertainment comebacks imaginable.
In fact, a case could be made that Mel Brooks was one of the most influential directors of his time. Do not laugh. (OK, laugh.) Think about it. When was the last time you saw someone make anything that remotely looked like a John Ford movie? How many movies out there are even comparable to Hitchcock’s work? Any aspiring Frank Capras out there? Thought not.
Case in point: One of the annoying little trends in Hollywood now is to introduce contemporary songs in movies where they don’t belong; Moulin Rouge, A Knight’s Tale, and Shrek have all indulged in this kind of anachronism. (And if someone, anyone, could get country radio stations to STOP PLAYING that wretched Faith Hill song that plays over the end credits of Pearl Harbor, I’d appreciate it. Thank you.) It’s the kind of thing that irritates critics no end. However, this is nothing really new.
Watch the first scene in Blazing Saddles. The racist cowboys in charge of the labor gang decide to torment the black and Chinese work crews by asking them for a working song, and Cleavon Little belts out a Cole Porter classic. An anachronism? Sure, but it’s funny, and that counts for more than anything else.
Blazing Saddles is a famously funny movie, of course, and it needs little or no explanation or criticism from me. It’s the story of Cleavon Little’s appointment as sheriff in the whitest town in the Wild Wild West, and the attempts by outlaws, renegades and lawyers to destroy him and the town. But it’s less a plot than a showcase for some great talents. Little is sharp and funny and cool as the man with the badge. Slim Pickens is as close to perfect as he can be in the second-funniest role of his career. Harvey Korman is Harvey Korman, and if he isn’t quite as over-the-top as he was in the old Carol Burnett show, that’s still OK. Madeline Kahn is wickedly funny in a brief role as the world’s worst cabaret singer. Brooks himself burnishes his reputation as a great scene-stealer.
In fact, the only cast member who doesn’t show to full advantage is Gene Wilder, who plays a laid-back alcoholic gunslinger. (The only scene I would have added to Blazing Saddles would have been a scene where Wilder shows up at an Old West AA meeting; “Hi, my name is the Waco Kid, and I’m an alcoholic.”) Wilder is a great passive-aggressive actor, but for some reason he never gets to show off his hysterical side in Blazing Saddles, and the movie is poorer for it. (You know what I’m talking about. “I’m hysterical! I’m hysterical! SPLASH! I’m wet! I’m wet and I’m hysterical!”)
There are three things about Blazing Saddles that are completely fascinating. First is the surprising one: that audiences still laugh. Blazing Saddles is as profane and politically incorrect as you’d expect from a Mel Brooks - Richard Pryor collaboration; in fact, it’s one of the few movies that’s in no danger of being remade anytime soon. The humor is gloriously offensive, and in a society where some people claim to be offended by works as inoffensive as the “Harry Potter” books and “Of Mice and Men”, it’s almost staggering that people still have the capacity to laugh at lynching scenes and frequent uses of the N-word and other forms of comic racial profiling. If you tried to make a movie today that featured Mel Brooks dressed like a Native American and using Yiddish slurs for African-Americans, there’d be more angry press releases than you could shake a stick at. (To be fair, one wonders how 70’s audiences would react if they were shown Freddy Got Fingered, let’s say.)
The second has to do with the movie’s signature scene; the great brawl between roughnecks and settlers that spills all over the screen and into the Warner Brothers lot. I was prepared for pretty much anything from Blazing Saddles, but I was emphatically not prepared for what I saw. When the overhead tracking shot panned away from the Western town to the skyline of (as J. Carson used to say) Beautiful Downtown Burbank, I thought it was a clever, ironic piece of filmmaking. Then the fight spilled over into another studio, and into the commissary, and out on the street, and over to Graumann’s Chinese Theater… and the whole thing was just brilliant; one of the true original moments in the movies.
The third has to do with the effect that Mel Brooks and Blazing Saddles have had on modern moviemaking. Blazing Saddles is primary source material for modern-day comedies; you see references to it everywhere. It’s almost as if it’s encoded in the Hollywood genome. Every fart joke in every movie can be traced back (and there’s a job for a researcher) to the climactic campfire scene in Blazing Saddles, if you try hard enough. Every mixed-race buddy cop movie owes something to the performances of Wilder and Little. If Hollywood made Westerns anymore, they’d have to feature things like horses getting punched in the jaw. To watch Blazing Saddles is to be reminded of every comedy you’ve seen in the last month, in one way or another, and that is the movie’s enduring legacy, such as it is.
So if there’s a Mel Brooks renaissance, it is long overdue. Blazing Saddles is a great, classic piece of work, second only to The Producers in the Brooks pantheon, and is beyond all praise.