MOVIES : FILM COMMENT : Higher Anxiety : Mel Brooks halts a string of sophomoric parodies with the richly satirical ‘Life Stinks,’ but it may get a bum’s rush at the box office

It cuts right to the heart of Mel Brooks’ “taste” problem that he named his latest movie “Life Stinks”--upgraded from “Life Sucks”--and insisted on a newspaper ad whose only image is of him looking dazed and disheveled above the title. Is this a movie or a promotion for euthanasia? And that unappetizing trailer selling the picture as some sort of riches-to-rags farce: Is there anyone out there in Ronald Reagan’s mortgaged America who wants to spend two laugh-filled hours on Los Angeles’ Skid Row?

The answer to the second question came quickly when “Life Stinks” opened on July 26: During its first three days, the movie grossed just $1.8 million in 850 theaters around the country, setting it off as one of the quickest flops of 1991.

That’s too bad. “Life Stinks,” a title that betrays its own conclusion, is not a flop by any other measure. It is a remarkably effective blend of slapstick and pathos, a story about a morally stunted industrialist forced to live among the homeless and to learn from them. Combining laughter and pain is never easy, but Brooks--fighting his own bad instincts, as well as the gag-huckster image he now calls “the bane of my existence”--managed to inhabit this world without a note of condescension.

“Life Stinks,” co-written by Brooks, Rudy De Luca and Steve Haberman, is the story of Goddard Bolt (Brooks), an insensitive empire builder who accepts a rival’s challenge to shed himself of wealth and title and try to survive for one month on Skid Row. While there, Bolt meets an assortment of characters, bonds with a couple of them, even develops a romantic relationship with the bag lady (Lesley Ann Warren) who gives him a new pair of old shoes. It’s a fantasy grounded in reality, a risky alliance that miraculously works.

At a time when Hollywood is busy reflecting America’s uninterest in social problems--in particular, the plight of the homeless--”Life Stinks” comes as not only one of the summer’s most entertaining films, but also one of its most relevant.

To most people, a “relevant Mel Brooks movie” is an oxymoron. For most of his career, the former Catskills comedian has been making pictures with a lampshade on his head, a series of occasionally riotous, dependably tasteless parodies and raw burlesques whose humor has more often been inspired by bodily functions than human behavior. The “Springtime for Hitler” number that Brooks wrote for his first film, the 1968 “The Producers,” remains his cleverest invention, but if you had to pick the one image that best represents his overall work, it would be those bean-scarfing cowboys passing gas around the campfire in “Blazing Saddles.” You may admire that scene’s audacity, but as cinema art, it’s a long drop from the Odessa Steps.

As “Life Stinks” reminds the handful of us who have seen it, Brooks didn’t have to come to this; he didn’t have to be saddled with the image of Hollywood’s maestro of bad taste. There was a moment in the early ‘70s when a person could reasonably have argued that it was Brooks, not Woody Allen, who represented the Great Jewish Hope for American film satire.

Two movies into their careers, Brooks had written and directed “The Producers” and “The Twelve Chairs,” both brimming with cynicism about the greed of man, and Allen was knocking off the glib parodies “What’s Up Tiger Lily?” and “Take the Money and Run.” Brooks’ pictures were vastly more mature in story, structure, production, performances and ambitions, but when “Blazing Saddles” caught moviegoers’ fancy in 1974, it was Brooks who took the money and ran, leaving Allen to gradually evolve as the country’s most respected and intellectually funny filmmaker.

In a way, the divergent paths of Brooks and Allen paralleled changes in the movie industry itself. By the mid-’70s, the studios were losing interest in social themes, done as either comedy or drama, and lowering their aim for teen-age moviegoers. It was Brooks who descended to the occasion, endearing himself to Hollywood with a run of broadly appealing parodies, while Allen’s continued eccentricities kept him at a respectable distance. Allen may have envied Brooks’ commercial success, but no one has enjoyed as much creative freedom as Allen, and it is Brooks who is now whining to interviewers about being a prisoner of his own image.

“I’m a purveyor of cheap jokes,” Brooks sarcastically labeled himself during a recent interview on National Public Radio. “Vulgarity or bad taste, I use it; therefore I’m painted with that brush.”

He went on to say that he created his Brooksfilms production company in order to make serious pictures (David Lynch’s “The Elephant Man” was one of the company’s first efforts), and even omitted his first name, fearing it would be a liability.

His name would have been a liability. Mel Brooks is synonymous with cheap jokes and bad puns. (“Don’t get saucy with me, Bearnaise.”) After his 1974 “Young Frankenstein,” a masterpiece of horror spoofs, Brooks got into a descending arc of lazy parodies. From “Silent Movie” to “High Anxiety” to “History of the World, Part I” to “Spaceballs,” he churned out some of the silliest and most sophomoric skits this side of the Mighty Carson Art Players.

Old films provided him with subjects, and old jokes kept him going: jokes about gays, minorities, gluttony, rape, Nazis, large-breasted women and well-endowed men. Madeline Kahn made a career out of leching over large male organs in “Blazing Saddles,” “History of the World” and “Young Frankenstein.” “Ah, sweet mystery of life, at last I’ve found you,” she sang, as the monster mounted her in “Young Frankenstein,” which is about as close to an explanation for the meaning of life as Brooks has attempted.

Frequently, the production itself became part of the show, drawing viewers in as participants (co-conspirators?) in the action. In “High Anxiety,” a meeting of psychiatrists is interrupted when the camera, moving in for a close-up, crashes through a window. In “Spaceballs,” the action is stopped while the bad guys fast-forward through a video version of the movie to see where the good guys are. In the last reel of “Blazing Saddles,” we not only pull back to see the showdown battle being shot on the Western street on Warner Bros.’ back lot, but then watch the fight spill into another set where the brawling cowboys take on the gay chorus line of a ‘30s musical.

Many of Brooks’ inventions have been as funny as they have been tasteless, but you have to go back to his first two films to actually spot an intellect at work, to find evidence of the kind of thoughtful commentary that is developed in “Life Stinks.” And you won’t find many of the base tricks that later became Brooks’ hallmarks.

“The Producers” was a terrific comedy idea--two conniving Broadway producers (Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder) scheme to skim profits from a failed play, but the plan backfires when the play becomes a hit--but it also pondered the ease with which an honest man can be corrupted by high stakes, by the possibility of instant wealth and the social standing that comes with it.

With the 1970 “The Twelve Chairs,” Brooks took those themes even further, telling the story of a disenfranchised nobleman driven to begging and stealing in post-Revolutionary Russia. Vorobyaninov (Ron Moody) is partnered with a common thief (Frank Langella) in a cross-country quest for jewels hidden by his late mother in the seat of a dining room chair that had been confiscated by the state. The search for the elusive chair sets up some funny situations--but again Brooks’ real interest seemed to be the corruption of innocence in the face of wealth. Vorobyaninov is not the only one corrupted; the family priest (Dom DeLuise), upon hearing of the buried treasure during the dying woman’s confession, becomes the chief rival in the chase.

“The Twelve Chairs” is as light a romp as “Tom Jones,” whose style Brooks may have been emulating, but its last image is of the former nobleman feigning an epileptic fit while his partner urges passersby to toss the poor bugger some rubles. The scene, or at least the indignity of it, is repeated in “Life Stinks” when Goddard Bolt is reduced to dancing for dimes on Skid Row.

Together, “The Producers” and “The Twelve Chairs” signaled the arrival of someone who was not only a gifted comedian and storyteller, but one with an apparent social agenda. A song Brooks wrote for “The Twelve Chairs” might have served as his career announcement, a declaration of themes. It could have been lifted whole and played over the credits of “Life Stinks”:

Hope for the best,

Expect the worst,

Some drink champagne,

Some die of thirst.

No way of knowing

Which way it’s going,

Hope for the best,

Expect the worst. “Hope for the Best” is not as irreverently funny as the deliciously ironic put-down of Aryan supremacy expressed in the lyrics of “Springtime for Hitler,” but it provided a rich foundation for satirizing contemporary class conflicts. We’ll never know where Brooks’ career may have taken him had he not meandered into facile parody, but “Life Stinks” gives us some idea.

The current movie--only the ninth that the 65-year-old Brooks has directed--takes the themes of “Hope for the Best” and places them in the heart of Los Angeles, in the few square blocks just south of the city’s government buildings. Tomorrow morning, you could drive onto the same streets where the film was shot and watch a thousand people sleeping, side by side under blankets and slabs of cardboard, on the sidewalks, see them rise and warm up to debris blazing in gutter bonfires, and then huddle around the entrance to the Main Street mission where breakfast will soon be served.

It is in the re-creation of this environment, of this lifestyle, that “Life Stinks” excels. Brooks has painted his developers and their lawyers with way too wide a brush, and he just couldn’t stop himself from tossing in a phallic joke and some Three Stooges slapstick. But he’s got his bad instincts under more control than usual--there are no “amusing” ethnic slurs, no one chatting at the camera--and even the worst scenes are in service of a point. This is a movie about the insensitivity of developers, about the attitudes of the rich toward the poor, of the desperation of people who, for whatever reason, are at the bottom of the food chain.

Some reach the top . . .

While others flop . . .

Hope for the best,

Expect the worst.

The world Brooks shows us is one where clinics are overworked and understaffed, their doctors given to tranquilizing the “problems” brought in from the street. When Bolt goes temporarily crazy upon learning that he has lost his real fortune, he is scooped from the street by paramedics and delivered to a crowded clinic where he is mistakenly given three separate injections of Thorazine. When a nurse notices him turning blue, the same doctor who ordered the injections looks at him and says, “This man is over-medicated. . . . How does this sort of thing happen?”

If that scene sounds painful, it actually plays very funny. “Life Stinks” is dark comedy, the most difficult sort, and it is in the film’s darkest moments that Brooks’ direction works best. The film’s most moving scene, one where Bolt finds his friend Sailor (so called because he was “almost” in the Navy) lying dead on the street, is followed immediately by its most morbidly funny image. As Sailor’s friends, trying to fulfill his request to bury him at sea, attempt to dump his ashes in the Los Angeles River, the remains are blown back into their faces, forcing them to say goodby to Sailor and brush him off at the same time.

Even in that scene, Brooks’ fascination with the fates of the rich and poor comes through. “The rich get an urn; they put the poor in a shoe box, like takeout,” says Warren’s Molly, as she carries Sailor’s ashes to the river.

Hope for the best,

Expect the worst,

The rich are blessed,

The poor are cursed .

Brooks may believe that he has raised social issues even in his dumb movies, but if he has, it smacks more of exploitation than an exercise of conscience. In “History of the World, Part I,” he has Roman senators debating a housing issue: “Should we build more palaces for the rich,” one senator asks, “or aspire to a nobler cause and build housing for the poor?” The others shout in unison, “(Bleep) the poor!”

You couldn’t find a more extreme contrast to that mean-spirited scene than the sentimental “Easy to Love” musical number Brooks stages in a rag factory in “Life Stinks.” The scene is a fantasy in which Molly--a dancer whose career and life hit the skids eight years earlier--acts out the kernel of hope that helps her survive and to show Bolt that some people with nothing have more than he does.

“Even without money, life is good,” Molly tells Goddard later. “Life is just moments. . . . Most of them are lousy, but once in a while you steal a good one.”

Live while you’re alive,

No one will survive.

Life is sorrow,

Here today and gone tomorrow.

In his NPR interview last week, Brooks said “Life Stinks” is the first film that is both a Mel Brooks movie and a Brooksfilms production. “This is the first time I’ve been able to come out of the closet,” he said. “I’ve never been allowed to fuse the quiet, dark, serious elements in me and the happy-go-lucky silly comedy.”

Given the rejection of “Life Stinks” at the box office, Brooks may be back in the closet for a while; he may never find another buyer for one of his social satires, and that will be our loss. Brooks is obviously capable of doing more than knockoff parodies, and with Hollywood still mostly closed to dramas dealing with social issues, humor may be the only viable way to deal with them.

Brooks has brought a lot of laughs into a lot of lives with his whoopie-cushion comedies, but they said nothing about the social conditions he now wants to address. With “Life Stinks,” he’s shown that he can make us care as well as laugh. Whether he’ll be able to develop those interests in the future or be forced to go back to the easy stuff . . . well, hope for the best, expect the worst.