Mel Brooks (1974)
One fire after another at BFI … hot on the heels of Incendies comes Blazing Saddles. This was the first time since the year of its release that I’d seen Mel Brooks’s Western spoof-cum-black-comedy and highest-grossing picture. Highest-grossing has multiple meanings in this case, courtesy of a generous supply of low humour and coarse acting. The theme song accompanying the opening titles – music by John Morris, words by Brooks – is a delight: rousing tune, ironically funny lyrics, Frankie Laine’s voice singing these straight, regular whip-cracks on the soundtrack that resoundingly confirm the number’s pastiche credentials. If the rest of it were as good, Blazing Saddles would be a great parody but the film’s first two-and-a-half minutes are its best.
In the 1870s, a railroad under construction on the American frontier needs to be rerouted through the town of Rock Ridge in order to avoid quicksand. Attorney-general Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman), a mercenary megalomaniac, plans to force out the residents. He sends in a gang of thugs, led by his henchman Taggart (Slim Pickens), to shoot the sheriff and trash the town. The locals then insist that the governor of the territory, William J Le Petomane (Brooks), appoint a replacement sheriff to protect them. As Lamarr watches preparations for an execution through his office window, he gets another idea. The condemned man is a Black railroad worker; Lamarr reckons a sheriff of colour is all that’s needed for the scandalised white population of Rock Ridge to up sticks and empty the place. His dastardly scheme is thwarted when hipster Bart (Cleavon Little) proves to be smart and resourceful, and strikes up a winning partnership with gunslinger Jim (Gene Wilder), aka ‘the Waco Kid’, a broken-down alcoholic but still the fastest draw in the picture.
Hedley Lamarr is one of many joke anachronisms in the screenplay (from a story by Andrew Bergman and credited to him, Brooks, Richard Pryor, Norman Steinberg and Alan Uger). Taggart’s sidekick Gum Chewer (Don Megowan) demands a ‘good old n***** worksong’ from the Black railroad workers. They oblige with a suave rendition of Cole Porter’s ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’ (and somehow persuade Gum Chewer and the other rednecks to sing ‘Camptown Races’). In the middle of Wild West mountain terrain, Count Basie and his orchestra suddenly appear to perform ‘April in Paris’. ‘What’s a dazzling urbanite like you doing in a rustic setting like this?’ the Waco Kid asks Bart on their first meeting. ‘What in the Wide, Wide World of Sports is a-goin’ on here?’ wonders Taggart. And so on. These absurdities, though they raise a few laughs, are one part of the indiscipline that not only blurs the picture’s lampooning focus but also neutralises its sardonic force – even makes it offensive in a way that Mel Brooks didn’t intend.
Blazing Saddles is showing at BFI as part of its Richard Pryor season (though Pryor isn’t in the cast). The BFI handout’s warning that ‘racist language and attitudes pervade the film’ is not an overstatement. The central plot idea – the advent of a Black sheriff will send white townsfolk running for the hills – is sharp but the resulting movie isn’t, and this is down to Brooks’s scattershot, anything-for-a-laugh approach. The racists, both the in-bred Rock Ridge locals (everyone’s surname is Johnson) and the nefarious authority figures, are merely ridiculous. Bart’s capital crime was to whack Taggart on the head with a railroad shovel but the victim was already brainless. The vain, squinting dimwit Le Petomane is mostly interested in screwing his buxom secretary (Robyn Hilton). Would-be mastermind Lamarr is easily cut down to size – whenever, for example, someone calls him Hedy instead of Hedley, which is often. Mel Brooks’s preoccupation with these things distracts him from the comic skewering of racism inherent in Hollywood Westerns. Because Bart’s foes are all fools, their racist attitudes and words are weightless.
The gags come thick and fast but often not fast enough. Lamarr reels off – by way of dictation to Taggart – a long list of sundry vicious types he wants rounded up to help them. As his boss talks, Taggart struggles to find something to write with. When the list finally ends, he says, ‘Can you repeat that?’ The sequence succeeds only if its point is to build to a weedy punchline. The sense that things are taking too long is mostly, though, a reflection of the overdone performances. Playing to the gallery tends to be time-consuming (exaggeration slows things down), and that’s what most of the actors do – including Brooks (he’s a Yiddish-speaking Native American chief as well as Le Petomane). Harvey Korman delivers quite a turn as Lamarr but the role is too big for this not to become tiresome.
There are exceptions, though a fine, essentially naturalistic actor like John Hillerman, as one of the Rock Ridge citizens, just seems out of kilter with what’s going on around him. Gene Wilder makes good use of the opportunity that more screen time gives him to establish his own eccentric rhythm, and his quiet delivery is refreshing. The casting of Cleavon Little is physically successful: tall and skinny, he cuts an amusingly elegant figure in the stylish outfits he wears with his sheriff’s star. Otherwise, Little is likeable but a bit bland for the supposedly wily Bart. At this distance in time, it’s hard not to see in his dandified appearance a precursor of Jamie Foxx as the title character in Django Unchained (2012). There’s another anticipation of Tarantino’s revisionist Western when Bart and Jim disguise themselves in Ku Klux Klan sheets, though the idea goes nowhere (Tarantino actually got more comic mileage out of his Klansmen).
In the climax to Blazing Saddles, an affray that involves townspeople, multi-ethnic railroad workers and Hedley Lamarr’s gangsters crashes into a different movie set, where camp choreographer Buddy Bizarre (Dom DeLuise) is directing a 1930s-style musical number (‘The French Mistake’) featuring a top-hat-and-tails male dance troupe. Buddy is prissily petulant even before the brawling Western factions invade his space – then spill into the Hollywood canteen where custard pies are thrown. The vanquished Lamarr hails a cab and instructs the cabbie to ‘drive me off this picture’. He arrives at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, where the premiere of Blazing Saddles is taking place. He sits down to watch it and sees on the screen Bart arriving outside Grauman’s. In a final showdown in the foyer, Bart shoots Lamarr, who expires in the stars’ handprints outside the theatre. Bart and Jim then take their seats to see the end of the movie, in which Bart tells the now grateful locals that he’s moving on because his work in Rock Ridge is done, he’s needed to right injustice elsewhere and ‘Speaking the plain truth is getting pretty damn dull around here’. He and Jim ride into the desert before dismounting and switching to a different kind of horsepower. A limousine drives them off into the sunset.
I’ve only a hazy memory of what I thought of Blazing Saddles when I was nineteen. I can’t pretend I didn’t enjoy things in the film forty-odd years later though I think some of the pleasure was mixed up with nostalgia for the time when I first saw it. Next to the opening titles, the highlight sees Bart and Jim confronted by a posse: the Waco Kid is so quick off the draw that he disarms all the posse’s members without a gun actually appearing in his hand. Not only is such a gracefully witty visual gag a rarity in Blazing Saddles – this also is, unequivocally, a gag that belongs in the film. Brooks’s meta finale works pretty well but would have more impact if he’d not already done so much genre-hopping. The racial element is the main incorrectness for a 2021 audience to contend with but not the only one – there’s also ogling at female cleavage, jokey homophobia and some rough treatment of equine cast members. Of those three things, only the last evokes the Western movie-making tradition (which it replicates as much as sends up). Hedley Lamarr is a soon-all-this-will-be-mine villain out of a different kind of picture. The hulk Mongo (Alex Karras), sent by Lamarr and Taggart to kill Bart but who ends up joining forces with the heroes, may have a crush on Bart and turns out nowhere near as dumb as he looks and, at first, sounds. Whether he’s a screen monster or a subversion of one, Mongo seems to have strayed into the picture as if Brooks’s mind was already on Young Frankenstein.
The baddies’ next decoy, the Teutonic seductress-songstress Lili Von Shtupp (Madeline Kahn) undone by Bart’s sex appeal, just about fits in thanks to Destry Rides Again, but this serves as a pretext for spoofing Marlene Dietrich more broadly. (Madeline Kahn was an exceptional comic talent yet there’s little pleasure in watching her, because of what she’s asked to do as Lili.) Even if, as might be argued, the incongruousness of these characters in a Western is part of the joke, that still dilutes the film’s satire. In The Producers, Mel Brooks used the follies of the Broadway theatre world as a route to mordantly funny ridicule of Nazism. Here, he seems driven not by anti-racist feeling but by mocking affection for movies of various genres, and by a comedy-for-comedy’s-sake imperative. That custard-pie fight in the Hollywood canteen sums up Blazing Saddles.
22 September 2021