by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I gave our envoi to the late comedian Gene Wilder by watching the
1974 comedy Blazing Saddles, the
third film directed by Mel Brooks and the first one to be a real blockbuster
hit. His first, The Producers,
had done O.K. at the box office — it would acquire cult status later,
especially after it was first shown on TV — and his second, The
Twelve Chairs, had been a total box-office
flop. (I remember the TV ads for this, which just made it look confusing: a
bunch of people running around beaches in Yugoslavia searching for 12 fancy
chairs, one of which contains a fortune in jewels hidden therein by an
aristocratic family in Russia to keep the Bolsheviks from getting it.) Brooks
was in what is now called “movie hell” when he received an offer from Warner
Bros. to direct a script by Andrew Bergman with the unpromising title Tex
X, about a Black sheriff who takes over a
small town in the Old West and re-establishes law and order against the
attempts of a predatory land baron to drive the residents out. Brooks told PBS
for the documentary Mel Brooks: Make a Noise that at first he turned down the job since he didn’t
want to direct a movie he hadn’t also written, but then Warners offered him
$100,000 for the job and Brooks decided that for that money he’d be willing to direct a movie based on
someone else’s script. The script went through the usual committee process —
the final screenplay is credited to Mel Brooks, Norman Steinberg, Andrew
Bergman, Richard Pryor, and Alan Uger — though Brooks, who cut his teeth in the
writers’ room of Sid Caesar’s TV classic Your Show of Shows alongside Woody Allen, Neil Simon and Larry Gelbart,
said he didn’t mind working in a room full of other writers. Pryor got involved
both because Brooks felt he needed help writing for a Black character and also
because Brooks wanted him to star in the film; he was willing but the “suits”
at Warners were worried about Pryor’s already legendary drug use and vetoed
him. Instead Brooks got Cleavon Little — a superior choice because he was both
more deadpan and considerably sexier (and, this being a Mel Brooks film, sex is
inevitably an important part of the plot!) — to play Bart, the Black sheriff
who comes to the rescue of the town of Rock Ridge after Governor William J.
LePetomane (Mel Brooks), attorney general Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman), and
railroad construction boss Taggart (Slim Pickens), hatch a plot to send in
outlaws to despoil the town and make its settler residents abandon it so Hedley
and his co-conspirators can snatch (a word Brooks milks for all its sexual
connotations!) the land on which Rock Ridge stands and make a corrupt killing
selling it to the railroad.
That’s about all the plot it has, and about all it
needs; it’s basically a series of comic set-pieces, from the opening in which
Bart and his friend on the railroad gang are ordered by Taggart to sing “one of
those authentic nigger spirituals” and instead go into a Mills Brothers-style
version of Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick out of You” to the sequence in which the
Rock Ridgians are awaiting their new sheriff, only to be shocked out of their
proverbial gourds when he turns out to be Black (the N-word is used so
constantly throughout this film it couldn’t be remade today). “Pardon me while
I whip this out,” Bart tells the townspeople, reaching into his crotch and
pulling out … his appointment papers from Governor LePetomane making him
sheriff of Rock Ridge. Gene Wilder enters the cast as Jim, a.k.a. the Waco Kid,
whom I’d always thought was a parody of Lee Marvin’s performance as Kid
Shelleen in Cat Ballou (itself a
wild spoof of Western clichés that seemed much tamer once Blazing
Saddles existed) but which also has
elements of Gregory Peck’s performance in The Gunfighter, notably the plot point that as the Waco Kid’s rep
grew so did the number of people determined to knock him off to earn their own
gunslinger fame as the man who shot him down. He tearfully confesses that when
he noticed that the latest would-be challenger who told him to reach for it was
just six years old, that was when
he gave up being the Waco Kid and became a drunk instead. In one scene he holds
out his right hand and keeps it so stone-stiff Bart says, “Steady as a rock” —
and the Waco Kid says, “Yes, but I shoot with this one,” and he holds out his left hand and it shakes
like Sister Kate’s bowl of jelly on a plate. Earlier the Kid had come to in his
cell, and in an upside-down point of view shot he sees Bart, the new sheriff,
through the bars (a clear copy of Alfred Hitchcock’s shot of Ingrid Bergman
discovering Cary Grant upside down after her night-long bout of alcohol in Notorious). “Are we awake?” Bart asks Jim, who’s sleeping
upside down hanging from his feet on the cell’s bunk bed. “We’re not sure,” Jim
replies. “Are we … Black?” “Yes, we are,” says Bart, to which Jim a.k.a. the
Kid replies, “Then we’re awake … but we’re very puzzled.”
To destroy the new
sheriff Lamarr (whose name was picked by the writers because it sounded like
the classic-era film star Hedy Lamarr — they set up a running gag throughout
the movie where Hedley is always being called “Hedy Lamarr,” and he replies,
with varying degrees of exasperation, “That’s Hedley!” At one point someone tells Hedley that “this is
1874 — you can sue her!,” and in
fact Hedy Lamarr did sue Warner
Bros. for poaching her name and the studio settled out of court) first sends in
killing machine Mongo (former football star Alex Karras) — oddly the DVD
version we were watching cuts out the various schemes by which Bart tries
unsuccessfully to subdue Bart and only includes the one that finally works (he
dresses up as a Western Union messenger and offers, “Candygram for Mongo!,” and
the package he gives him contains a bomb — later Bart says, “The hardest part
was inventing the candygram, and of course I won’t get credit for it”) — and
then, when that doesn’t work, calls in seductress Lili von Schtupp (Madeline
Kahn) — the last name is a Yiddish vulgarism for sex Lenny Bruce used often,
and the character is a screamingly funny parody of Marlene Dietrich, complete
with missing “r”’s — at one point she even writes a note and the “r”’s are
replaced by “w”’s throughout — and a song called “I’m Tired” which Mel Brooks
wrote himself as an obvious parody of “The Laziest Gal in Town,” which the real
Dietrich sang in Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (1950). I remember that when Blazing
Saddles first came out the Rolling
Stone reviewer complained that “Brooks
hates the Germans so much they get dragged anachronistically into Blazing
Saddles,” but the critic obviously didn’t
know that Dietrich had made at least two Westerns, Destry Rides Again (1939) and The Spoilers (1942) — The Spoilers was geographically a “Northern” since it took place
in Klondike-era gold rush Alaska, but iconographically it was a Western and
Dietrich’s co-stars, John Wayne and Randolph Scott, were Western people — and
Kahn’s characterization here was clearly based on her role in Destry (as well as her star-making turn in The
Blue Angel).
Eventually the final invasion of
Rock Ridge is foiled — only the fight spreads out from the Blazing
Saddles set across the Warner Bros. lot to
an adjoining soundstage where screaming-queen director Buddy Bizarre (Dom
DeLuise, later a Mel Brooks regular) is filming a musical number called “The
French Mistake.” The fight spills out all over Hollywood and into Grauman’s
Chinese Theatre, where Hedley Lamarr finally gets his (after stopping by the
candy counter and ordering Raisinettes, whose manufacturer rewarded Brooks for
his product placement with a lifetime supply of their product!) and Cleavon
Little and Gene Wilder turn up to watch the ending of the movie, in which their
characters ride off into the sunset … in a Cadillac. When I first saw Blazing
Saddles during its initial theatrical release
I was put off by the ending, but now I think it’s as funny as the rest of the
movie even though the whole “French Mistake” number is pretty homophobic (a
decade later, when Brooks and his wife Anne Bancroft did their remake of To
Be or Not to Be — Ernst Lubitsch’s
screamingly funny dark comedy about the Nazi occupation of Poland during World
War II and the efforts of husband-and-wife acting team Carole Lombard and Jack
Benny to resist it — his writers inserted a sympathetic Gay character to protest
the Nazi oppression against Queers and a lot of critics were surprised that
Brooks depicted Gays positively after all the rather crude jokes against us
he’d made before) and, as Charles pointed out, the movie’s relentless sexism
rather gets to a modern viewer after a while. (If Brooks and his writers had
somehow been able to get a parody of Doris Day’s Calamity Jane character into Blazing Saddles it would not only wear better, it’d be even funnier
than it is!)
Of course I also liked the magical appearance of Count Basie and
his orchestra in the middle of the desert as Cleavon Little rides by in a
magnificently decked out horse, complete with a saddlebag labeled “Gucci,” and
Basie high-fives Little as he passes; and also the nice in-joke in which everyone
in the town of Rock Ridge has the last name “Johnson” — the ice-cream parlor is
run by, natch, Howard Johnson; and one of the residents is named Olson Johnson,
after the real-life 1930’s and 1940’s comedy team Olsen and Johnson (who also made a film with Count Basie — the 1943 Universal
production Crazy House). There
were even a few in-jokes I hadn’t
got before, like the one in which Hedley Lamarr’s executioner Boris (Robert
Ridgely) — a character spoofing Boris Karloff’s role as Mord the Executioner in
the 1939 film Tower of London
(with Basil Rathbone starring as Richard III) — is about to hang a man in a
wheelchair (he’s trying to hang the person and the wheelchair simultaneously
and lamenting that “this is an unusually difficult case”) and Lamarr says, “Ah,
the Dr. Gillespie case.” (In the late-1930’s Dr. Kildare films from MGM Dr. Kildare was played by Lew Ayres
and his boss, Dr. Gillespie, was played by Lionel Barrymore, who used a
wheelchair on screen because his arthritis had got so bad he needed one for
real.) Though I wouldn’t necessarily call Blazing Saddles the funniest movie ever made (even among Brooks’
movies it’s seriously rivaled by The Producers and Young Frankenstein, and of course if you reach backwards to Chaplin,
Keaton, the Marxes, Laurel and Hardy, and W. C. Fields, you can find movies
even funnier!), it’s a film that holds up brilliantly and, as I said when it
was new, has the courage of its own bad taste — even though the bean scene,
inspired (Brooks said) by the fact that so many non-comic Westerns showed
cowboys subsisting on a diet almost exclusively of beans without showing any of
the usual after-effects of consuming them, has had a highly negative effect on
future comedies by convincing writers and directors that involuntary body
functions are in themselves funny. They’re not, but Brooks’s flatulence scene
is.
