High Anxiety
Mel Brooks (1977)
Mel Brooks is sometimes accused of playing a percentage game with the dialogue he writes, of piling on the gags at the expense of shaping his scripts. Guilty as charged: he may be a great film fan but his scattershot approach limits his effectiveness as a genre parodist. Jokes that don’t grow organically from the material stick out like sore thumbs in this type of comedy; discipline is essential and what Brooks almost glories in lacking. Thanks to the title song, the opening credits sequence of Blazing Saddles hinted at greater comic control but Brooks lost concentration in no time. There are promising signs at the start of High Anxiety too: John Morris’s pastiche of Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho music, pairs of feet struggling to get a grip on an escalator, the dizzying design of a carpet in an airport departure lounge. But they’re almost immediately offset by Brooks’ mugging imitation of terror on his first appearance on the screen, by a gratuitous queer-flasher joke and by the realisation that the lavishly anguished strings playing Morris’s score are masking a conventional ballad tune. Brooks will use that tune later for a big set piece – a parody of Frank Sinatra that’s a highlight of High Anxiety even though it has nothing to do with a Hitchcock spoof.
Brooks used to limit his own time on screen to mascot-like supporting roles (there were two in Blazing Saddles) but now he’s his own star. He doesn’t inhabit a role; he just yells that he’s Mel Brooks (and he really does yell) throughout – as if comic acting consists of being yourself with a loud voice and exaggerated gestures. Brooks is meant to be Dr Richard H Thorndyke, newly appointed head of the Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous. Towards the end of High Anxiety, the characters he and Madeline Kahn play disguise themselves as a cutely bickering Jewish couple to get past airport security officers because, ‘If you’re loud and annoying, psychologically people don’t notice you’. This film proves otherwise – you can’t fail to notice the performers. Brooks’s shouting is widely infectious (though Kahn stays clear of it); he also favours leering close-ups. His lack of interest in the technical side of parody makes him ill equipped to mimic the unease that Hitchcock’s camera movement often generates. Shot in black-and-white, Young Frankenstein was not only Brooks’ best but also his best-looking film to date: there was a definite visual style to imitate and the cinematographer Gerard Hirschfeld sustained it. Perhaps it’s the embarrassment of stylistic riches available to draw on in Hitchcock that has made Brooks and Paul Lohmann so visually unambitious. The camerawork tends to alternate between static and frenetic, and there’s nothing subliminally scary.
In a scene in which an Institute inmate is interviewed by Thorndyke and the sartorially impeccable Dr Montague to determine whether he’s well enough to be discharged, why is Montague (Harvey Korman) oily and insinuating, then comically weak willed, then malevolent? The answer seems to be that it’s more fun for Brooks and Harvey Korman that way. It’s not long before Montague is revealed to be a cringing masochist but he continues to conceal the fact in later scenes – pointlessly once it’s been exposed. Cloris Leachman is the Teutonic Nurse Diesel, an extended replay of the Frau Blücher character she played in Young Frankenstein. Leachman gave a fascinating performance in The Last Picture Show and is charming in TV comedy parts like Phyllis in The Mary Tyler Moore Show but here she’s required to be funny for an awfully long time on a single track, and she’s soon tiresome. Nurse Diesel’s appearance is both farcically and realistically grotesque: she has mammoth breasts that point like weapons but also a pencil line of dark facial hair. The strain of growling out of the side of her large, oblong mouth really tells on Leachman. Minor figures, like Ron Carey’s dimly sympathetic chauffeur and Darrell Zwerling’s nutty academic, have just one characteristic each.
The only interesting playing comes from Madeline Kahn, with her combination of a cool, verging-on-prudish exterior and sensual fire down below. The lustrous blonde wig she wears as Victoria – the daughter of Arthur Brisbane (Albert Whitlock), a rich industrialist who’s being kept a virtual prisoner as a patient at the Institute – recalls Hitchcock ice blondes like Grace Kelly and Tippi Hedren; her tremulous line readings send them up. Kahn doesn’t appear until about halfway through the film but she’s by some way its chief asset – especially when Victoria is ooh-ing and aah-ing in reaction to the Sinatra routine, which also sees Mel Brooks at his best.
The ideas in the script (Ron Clark, Rudy De Luca and Barry Levinson share the screenplay credit with Brooks) are often lazy. Dr Thorndyke describes an Institute inmate who believes he’s a cocker spaniel as the most amazing psychological phenomenon he’s ever encountered but wouldn’t an animal more unusual than a dog be more amazing? Plenty of people must have had canine delusions for man-thinks-he’s-a-dog jokes to be so familiar. When Thorndyke addresses a convention of psychiatrists, there are portraits of Freud, Jung, Adler et al on the wall. Their presence serves only to underline how weakly written the sequence is – it needs a barrage of psychoanalytic jargon to be satirically effective. During question time after the lecture, two little girls arrive in the auditorium and ask about penis envy and toilet training. Thorndyke’s answers, expressed in coy baby talk, don’t stand out enough from what’s he’s been saying to the learned gathering.
The menace of birds gathering on a telegraph wire is instantly dispelled when one of them shits on Thorndyke’s head. Those pigeons are an early announcement that Mel Brooks isn’t interested in constructing a tight, logically satisfying plot or creating sustained tension to give his jokes more impetus. Occasionally, he manages to reference two Hitchcock films at once[1] but, for the most part in High Anxiety, he thrashes around in a style more reminiscent of daft horror films than of Hitchcockian suspense
[1970s]
[1] Afternote: Not that I knew many at the time, though I did understand where Dr Thorndyke got his fear of heights from. I hadn’t seen Spellbound.