Blazing Saddles (Crossbow Productions, Warner Bros., 1974)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The next Mel Brooks movie TCM showed Saturday night came about through an even weirder set of circumstances than The Producers. After The Producers did O.K. at the theatrical box office and then attracted major attention on TV, Joseph E. Levine green-lighted Brooks’ next film, a satirical farce about Russia during the early days of the Revolution called The Twelve Chairs. It dealt with an aristocratic family whose members decide to hide their jewelry collection into one of 12 fancy chairs so the Bolsheviks don’t seize it – only the chairs are dispersed all over Russia and the dispossessed aristocrat who was the son-in-law of their original owner chases throughout the country for them. I remember Levine’s ads for this movie, which featured various strangely dressed actors running around on a beach containing the titular 12 chairs, only they weren’t persuasive enough to get people to see the movie and it was a terrific flop. At least part of the reason it flopped was that Mel Brooks had written the part of the son-in-law for Gene Wilder, but Wilder had a divo hissy-fit and insisted he’d only be in the movie if he could play the drop-dead gorgeous leading man ultimately cast with Frank Langella – so Ron Moody ended up in the lead and, while he was perfectly acceptable, he was no Gene Wilder and the movie suffered from it, especially since it was quite obvious that Brooks was directing Moody to act as much like Wilder as possible and Moody wasn’t rangy enough to pull it off. After The Twelve Chairs Brooks ended up in what’s been called “movie hell,” in which you’re still technically a filmmaker but no producer will actually back you in a film.

He got out of movie hell when Warner Bros. offered him the chance to make a film called Tex X, a Western spoof in which a Black man is offered the job of sheriff in a Western town and saves it from greedy land barons despite the townspeople’s racist qualms about his color. At first Brooks turned down on the ground that he didn’t want to direct a movie he hadn’t written himself. But when Warners offered $100,000 for his services, Brooks decided that for once he could set aside his qualms about directing someone else’s script – though he grabbed hold of the project and thoroughly remodeled it. The original writer was Andrew Bergman, but the final writing credits went to Brooks, Norman Steinberg, Bergman, Richard Pryor and Alan Uger. Pryor was involved not only because Brooks wanted a Black person involved in the project to write the Black characters’ dialogue but also because he was hoping Pryor would play the lead. But Warners’ staff, leary about casting Pryor because of his already legendary drug use, vetoed him and so drop-dead gorgeous Cleavon Little got the lead instead.

I’ve loved Blazing Saddles ever since my mother, my brother and I saw it in a theatre on its original release in 1974, and I’ve often hailed it with the words I had about it then: “It has the courage of its own bad taste.” Brooks assembled a superb cast top to bottom, including Little as the sheriff; Slim Pickens as the racist boss of a railroad crew who discovers quicksand along the proposed rail route and therefore has to re-route it through the town of Rock Ridge (which sets off the action); Mel Brooks as grafting and sex-obsessed governor William J. LePetomane (who, like Zero Mostel’s character in The Producers, has a big-bosomed secretary whose talents appear to be exclusively physical); Harvey Korman as attorney general Hedley Lamarr (throughout the movie there’s a running gag about the similarity of his name to that of 1940’s movie star Hedy Lamarr, including one in which after he’s corrected someone who’s called him “Hedy Lamarr” and he’s said, “That’s Hedley,” the person he was talking to says, “Don’t worry! This is 1870! You can sue her!” Hedy Lamarr actually sued, though I have no knowledge whether she actually got any money), the principal villain; Madeline Kahn in the delightful role of “Lili von Schtupp,” a parody of Marlene Dietrich who’s sent by Hedley Lamarr to seduce Bart but ends up his sex slave instead (she wonders aloud whether Black men are really better hung than white ones and when she experiences him, she cries out in ecstasy, “It’s twue! It’s twue! It’s twue!”); Alex Karras as Mongo, yet another one of Lamarr’s thugs who changes sides when Bart bests him in a contest of wits by sending him an explosive candygram; Dom DeLuise as Gay dance director “Buddy Bizarre”; and a whole bunch of townspeople named “Johnson” because one of the script’s conceits is that everyone in Rock Ridge has the last name “Johnson.”

Thus we have John Hillerman as “Howard Johnson,” owner of the town’s orange-roofed ice cream parlor (apparently we’re supposed to believe this was the start of the Howard Johnson’s chain). George Furth as “Van Johnson” (after another 1940’s movie star), Jack Starrett as “Gabby Johnson” (after the real-life 1940’s Western star George “Gabby” Hayes, whose dialogue is so unintelligible one of the other characters praises it as “authentic Western gibberish”); and the one that particularly amused me, David Huddleston as “Olsen Johnson.” This rather back-handed tribute to the great 1930’s and 1940’s comedy team of Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson gives this movie two links to Olsen and Johnson’s 1943 film Crazy House, since Count Basie and his band appear in both films. In Blazing Saddles Basie and his band are in the middle of the Western desert, playing to absolutely no one, until Bart rides by fully decked out in his buckskin outfit (complete with saddle bags labeled “Gucci”) – the first time we’ve seen him in this movie not covered in mud – and he high-fives Basie as Basie and the band play his famous start-and-stop arrangement of “April in Paris.”

Next to Bart, the main character is Jim, also known as the Waco Kid, a former gunfighter who tumbled down from his reputational pedestal as the fastest gun in the West because every person he met tried to hijack his reputation by knocking him off (a plot point borrowed from Henry King’s great 1950 film The Gunfighter, starring Gregory Peck as Johnny Ringo – whose name inspired Beatles’ drummer Richard Starkey to call himself Ringo Starr) – until a six-year-old kid challenged him to draw and ended up shooting him in the ass. It’s a measure of Mel Brooks’ confidence in his own skills as a laugh-maker that he could take a character that was already a parody in another movie (Lee Marvin’s role as good-guy gunslinger Kid Shelleen in the 1965 Western spoof Cat Ballou) and make him even funnier – just as, in his next collaboration with Gene Wilder, Young Frankenstein, he would take the British Gay-camp humor of James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein and fuse it with his own Borscht-belt humor to create another comedy masterpiece. The part of the Waco Kid ended up being played by Gene Wilder even though he and Brooks were probably still on the outs with each other after the debacle of The Twelve Chairs, and before that Brooks had wanted to hire an authentic Western star for the part. He even offered it to John Wayne, who not surprisingly turned it down. The first actor Brooks signed for the part was Gig Young, who was already so far down the primrose path due to the alcohol abuse that destroyed his career that when he came to shoot the character’s first scene – the Waco Kid, hanging upside down from a bed rail in his cell, sees Bart and when Bart asks him, “How are we?,” he answers, “I don’t know. Are we … Black?” – nothing intelligible came out of Young’s mouth.

So Brooks fired him and let bygones be bygones about Wilder, inviting him to take the part over – which he did – even though we can see the seeds of disagreement between the two that would flare up in open conflict as they made Young Frankenstein. According to Newsweek magazine, Brooks and Wilder constantly argued during Young Frankenstein, always over the same thing: Wilder wanted the humor more subtle and Brooks wanted it more broad. Among the other touches Brooks brought to Blazing Saddles was to hire Frankie Laine to sing the film’s theme song over the opening credits without bothering to tell the singer that the movie was a spoof. So Laine brought to the song the same intensity he’d done with the themes from such 1950’s Westerns as High Noon (even though it was country star Tex Ritter, not Laine, who sang in the actual film) and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral as well as the TV series Rawhide, which loosed Clint Eastwood on the entertainment world. Blazing Saddles remains a very funny film, though it probably couldn’t get remade today because of the relentless use of the “N”-word – today’s P.C. Thought Police would damn this film on that ground alone and miss the point that all the uses of the “N”-word are satirical and it’s the racists that are the butts of the jokes. I hadn’t expected to write this much about my recent go-round with Blazing Saddles since I’d already done a previous moviemagg blog post about it at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2016/09/blazing-saddles-crossbow-productions.html, but it remains an all-time favorite film of mine despite lapses like the bean-eating cowboys’ fart scene, which on its own is actually funny but has launched a thousand bad imitations by writers and directors who seem to think the mere mention or sound of flatulence is funny.