Blazing Saddles
Mel Brooks' greatest strength, I think, was his lack of discretion. When watching an early Brooks film, one gets the impression he never wrote (or directed) a joke he didn't utterly adore. Blazing Saddles, the director's finest film, is a boisterous, quasi-offensive, absurd, and very often funny parody of the western genre.
I doubt a summary of plot will do any good here. (I don't think synopses serve much function in general, to be perfectly honest.) At bottom, the continuous gags are the narrative. The script was assembled by a team of four writers, including Brooks and Richard Pryor, and there are hints throughout the picture of an incompatibility its collaborators had with one another, manifested by its unevenness.
Brooks' directorial execution often suffers from premature ejaculation; he has a propensity to spit out the punchline before we've been given the proper set-up. This is hardly of any consequence, however, because Brooks isn't looking to evoke any comedic orgasm in his audience. No sir, he treats burlesque like a chore. So we get a few chuckles instead of the big laugh.
However, all this bitching aside, I genuinely enjoy the movie. It's a romp if there ever was one, at breakneck speed. Brooks is so careless, tact being the first thing thrown from the window, that when you're not laughing at the jokes, you're snickering at the sheer audacity the director displays by staging some of these gags. Morever, there a few gems in the film that would have most likely been abandoned by the more self-conscious comedian/film-maker. At times you feel as though your "taste" is wrestling with the film's silliness, and in my case, the silliness frequently prevailed.
I liked most of the performances, particularly Gene Wilder's, who so perfectly plays the "Washed-Up-But-He's Still-Got-It" cowboy. Cleavon Little is ingratiating as a black sheriff appointed duty in a racist town, and Madeline Kahn pulls off a delightfully wearied dance number quite nicely. And Mel in full Indian garb is a sight.
The most severe flaw in Brooks' oeuvre has been his affection for the genres he parodies. Never do his films bloom into full-fledged lampoons, this due to a certain respect he has for movies he's mocking. Sure, he plays with the conventions of the western in Blazing Saddles, but his satire is more akin to innocuous poking than effective uppercuts. Blazing Saddles works because it exploits the genre's milieu as a context for manifold gags; but when his films are parodies and little more, such as Young Frankenstein and Dracula: Dead and Loving It, they seem uninspired, impotent, and most deplorable of all, unfunny.
Stephen Lang -- (smj@phoenixat.com) Premature Thoughts on Films -- (http://users.southeast.net/~chuckd21/smj/smjindex.html)
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