Blazing Saddles

A few years ago, Broadway producers decided to adapt a Mel Brooks comedy and made a bundle. Could it happen again with 'Blazing Saddles?' The movie already has four great songs; a half-dozen more of similar caliber would make for a strong score. 'Blazing Saddles' has a ready-made cast of over-the-top characters, strong audience identification, and some minor problems for a theatrical production (like blowing up the phony Rock Ridge) which are easily overcome.

But 'The Producers' was a cult film that never made it to Main Street and needed the second act of a Broadway musical to give it a place in popular culture. 'Blazing Saddles' could never open again as big as it did in 1974. In the summer of Watergate and Patty Hearst, here was one bit of madness people could enjoy. And it wasn't just random kookiness, but a film that broke barriers and courted controversy like no other major-release film of its time. No other movie had characters that were basically likable if stupid throwing around the 'N' word before. In fact, it hasn't happened since (and I doubt it would on Broadway today.) The whole notion of white people and black people living together was not new, but the approach of 'Blazing Saddles' was certainly new. In order to live together, we have to laugh together first. The only way this film was not a trailblazer was in that it blazed trails untaken by any film that came after.

Was Cleavon Little then a civil rights pioneer for the 1970s, in a way Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were the decade before? He's very good, bringing a lightness to the role that's equal parts Shaft and Bugs Bunny. Richard Pryor was one of the film's writers and Brooks' first choice for Sheriff Bart, but Pryor wouldn't have played the role in the same smooth way. Little is an amiable actor, one step ahead but never cocky about it. He makes for a sympathetic center, and he is flash in those corduroy threads.

Little didn't work much after 'Blazing Saddles,' which makes no sense. It was only the highest-grossing Western of all time, and Little was the lead actor in it. Maybe institutional racism wasn't the sole cause. After all, he had a distractingly rock-solid cast around him, particularly Harvey Korman as Attorney General Hedley Lamarr. Growing up in the '70s, it was a shock the first time I saw the unedited 'Blazing Saddles' with all the casual vulgarity spewing from the mouth of Tim Conway's slapstick buddy on the ultra G-rated 'Carol Burnett Show.' 'You will be only risking your lives, whilst I will be risking an almost-certain Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor,' he tells his gang before they ride off to pillage Rock Ridge. If only the Academy didn't penalize comedies so, that might have been true.

Madeline Kahn did get nominated for Lili Von Shtupp, and deserved her Laurel and Hardy handshake for sure. Her Baba Wawa meets Marlene Dietrich performance is a comic masterpiece, and it takes guts to wear that dead-weed lingerie in which she performs 'I'm So Tired.' Slim Pickens (Taggart), Burton Gilliam (Lyle), Dom DeLuise (Buddy), and Brooks himself as 'the Gov' all shine, and the level of comic acting remains high all the way to the smallest roles, like the guy playing Hitler ('They lose me right after the bunker scene') and the cowboy who chews gum in line ('I didn't know there was gonna be so many people!')

Gene Wilder is a little young and ironic for the bitter ex-gunslinger known as the Waco Kid, but he grows into the role well enough. Certainly he was in tune with what Brooks was doing more than Gig Young or Dan Dailey would have been (Brooks' earlier choices for the part, with Young making it all the way to the first day's shooting before it was discovered he wasn't just acting the part of a hopeless drunk.)

'Blazing Saddles' doesn't make the IMDb top 250, but it's still one of the most significant video titles because it rewards repeat viewings so well. The wholeness of the film's comic spectacle is too dense to be absorbed in one viewing, especially when you are laughing too hard. It's a cultural landmark, yes, but it's even funnier now than it was 30 years ago, one of the funniest comedies that exist today. Making it into a musical now would almost be demeaning, but I suspect it will happen anyway.

Quality. many people who love this film may feel that the negative comments from others are inoffensive as this is such a funny film, I will say this. They are entitled to their opinions ...even if they are wrong. This is one of the best comedies ever made.

Firstly it's not just Mel Brooks as scriptwriter which seems to make a big difference to the quality of the film he produces (Yung Frankestein is co-written by Gene Wilder) but then you have a cast in fine form, especially Harvey Corman as the fantastic Hedley Lamarr (Not Hedy, It's Hedley!) add to that a fantastic series of sight gags and word play, with a good dose of racism ridicule thrown in for good measure (...and they is so DUMB!)and it all makes for a brilliant mix of inspired film-making.

There are numerous scenes of note, but the scene of the townsfolk looking at their work and Bart chasing after the bad guy still makes my skin cold as they are genuinely moving moments.

best visual gag though has got to be the Wako Kid versus the goons at the railroad top drawer Much Love Mike

Howling comedy from Mel Brooks about the Old West with a script that keeps you laughing all the way through and a cast of characters right up there with the Marx Brothers. Kahn is especially tempting as a Marlene Dietrich-like performer, while director Brooks has a fine little cameo as a befuddled and distracted governor. The skits and sight gags are constant. One of the funniest films ever made!

Mel Brooks found a way in 1974 to direct two of the greatest comedies of all time. And in that one year, he found a way to cram as many movie parodies, and not have any overlap, as any director can in Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles. What Young Frankenstein was to the 1930s horror movies Blazing Saddles was to the Westerns of the 1960s. And add in there the oppression of blacks during the same time, and you have a biting satire on the role of blacks in society, if not in 1974, at least the way it was in 1874. Cleavon Little (by the way, he's black) plays Bart, a slave laborer for Hedley Lamarr's (Harvey Korman in a GREAT performance as a scheming government employee) railroad who needs to cut through the town of Rock Ridge for completion. The townspeople won't sell their land, so Lamarr has the sheriff killed and replaced with Bart. He's not really welcomed into the town, but with help from Jim, the Waco Kid (Gene Wilder) he is able to earn's the town's trust. Standard plot, and a plot that does not really matter. The humor is so scatological, from so many periods of time, that we know it's a movie, and the characters in the movie know they are in a movie. Take Slim Pickens when he cries out "What in the wide world of sports is going on here?" And the final 10 minutes of the movie is just odd in any other movie, but somehow works in Blazing Saddles. So much humor is cut out of the TV versions, so don't waste your time with it. It has to be seen with the language and "sexually suggestive" scenes to be fully appreciated.

In its side-splitting takedown of racism and all-purpose ignorance, 1974's "Blazing Saddles" is one of the boldest and most important satires ever made. As raunchy and as ludicrous as it is whip-smart, it can claim parentage of modern-day parodies from "South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999)" to "Sausage Party (2016)" to music industry spoof "Stadium Anthems (2018)" in their uses of obscenity, intelligence, and song to expose inane social truths.

It's the Wild West. Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman) is a white business opportunist with moronic and hyper-sexed governor William J. LePetomane (Mel Brooks) in his back pocket. Lamarr wants to build a railroad through the outpost town of Rock Ridge. When he can't scare off the town folk, he incites chaos by saddling them with a black sheriff (Bart, played by the now-iconic Cleavon Little), who just days before was a railroad laborer sentenced to hanging. It turns out that the sly Bart is a rare sage in a frontier littered with dumb white people; he pairs with booze-soaked gunslinger Jim (Gene Wilder) to rally the town against Lamarr's thugs.

Wearing no seatbelt, "Blazing Saddles" rebukes the absurdity of racism with its own absurdist countermeasures. While its blueprint would never make it past present-day studio tastemakers, its defrocking of ignorance has never been better primed for mass consumption. This is a watershed comedy that presides atop any short list of film's greatest satires. - (Was this review of use to you? If so, let me know by clicking "Helpful." Cheers!)