From the Archives: Was the West Ever Like This?
“Never give a saga an even break,” says the gloating slogan for Mel Brooks’ new comedy “Blazing Saddles,” and they don’t write ad-lines that come any closer to catching the full, rich flavor of the product. His mock-down, knock-down, bawdy, gaudy, hyper-hip burlesque western is irreverent, outrageous, improbable, often as blithely tasteless as a stag night at the Friar’s Club and almost continuously funny. It is a two-hour revue sketch with overtones of Mad Comics, Lenny Bruce, the National Lampoon and the Old Howard. It is to Zane Grey as Little Orphan Fanny is to Daddy Warbuck’s wide-eyed ward.
It embraces such antic visions as Brooks himself playing both an oblique-eyed lechering governor (named as a very in-joke after a real French vaudeville star whose act was the most bizarre of them all) and a Yiddish-speaking indian chief.
There is also Madeline Kahn (from “What’s Up, Doc?” and “Paper Moon”) doing a maliciously exact counterfeit of Marlene Dietrich in a burnt-out torch song written by Brooks and called “I’m Tired.”
Among the additional treasures are Harvey Korman as the suave, irascible and incompetent chief villain hysterical at the loss of his rubber frog in the bathtub, and Gene Wilder as the fastest gun in the world, drinking himself shaky after being shot by a 6-year-old. Footballer Alex Karras is a weak-brained giant who puts his whole head in the campfire to light a cigar.
It is all blazing nonsense which conjures up most of its humor by relocating present foolishnesses in its false-front parody of the past. A few too many of the laughs arise in the shock effect of strong language from unlikely sources but in a jokey enterprise like “Blazing Saddles” it is the batting average which matters and Brooks has a grand season.
The story, dreamed up by Andrew Bergman and scripted by Bergman, Brooks, Norman Steinberg and Richard Pryor, establishes Cleavon Little as a cool black dude with Gucci saddlebags who swaps the hangman’s noose for a suicide mission as sheriff of a snarling and ungrateful town jeopardized by Korman and his cutthroats under the vacuum-headed leadership of Slim Pickens. As the late Bobby Clark classically remarked of his revival of “Sweethearts,” never was a thin plot so complicated.
Looking for messages in “Blazing Saddles” is like going to a weighing machine for advice. What Brooks wants us to do is laugh our untroubled heads off, and he will try anything to achieve this welcome result.
There are elaborate sight gags, a pie fight, some rousing and ridiculous street brawls, a takeoff on a Busby Berkeley dance routine (apoplectically choreographed by Dom DeLuise as someone suspiciously called Bubby Bizarre).
“Blazing Saddles” may at that have an instructive tone, if not a message, in the sense that when you take everything as crazy, overturning tradition, form, logic, dignity and ceremonious duty, you do sort out what is foolish and isn’t, what was and what wasn’t. The derision is amiable and if the hero is black, the comedy really isn’t, although it is an interesting tattle-tale gray. Virtue triumphs, even, although it dismounts and climbs into a studio limousine for the ride into the sunset.
For the adult and not easily offended audience for whom Brooks has done this mad frontier frolic, “Blazing Saddles” offers an extraordinary quantity of unrestrained laughter. As with “Where’s Poppa?” you are not invariably sure that you ought to be laughing, but you do.
John Morris did the score, with unexpected help from Count Basie and his prairie swingers. The performances without exception are farce-playing at its polished best.
