Film review

  • Blazing Saddles

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

  • Incendies

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Denis Villeneuve (2010)

    BFI is running a ‘Denis Villeneuve: The Path to Dune’ season, ahead of the release of his new adaptation of the Frank Herbert novel(s).  This path has taken Villeneuve from Quebec to Hollywood, stumbling with Prisoners (2013) and Sicario (2015), making progress with Arrival (2016).  Incendies, my introduction to his French-Canadian work, is different class from any of these US-made pictures[1].  The source material is a 2003 stage play of the same name by the Lebanese-Canadian Wajdi Mouawad.  In the Sight & Sound (July 2011) extracts that comprised the BFI handout, Villeneuve says that, when he saw the play, ‘it was like a punch in the jaw.  I emerged from the theatre on shaky knees.  Right away I knew I was going to make it into a movie’.  The result is impressive.  Incendies’ only problem, a large one, is that the two main elements – graphic war drama and family mystery story – don’t mesh, are perhaps even in conflict with each other.

    In present-day Montreal, a lawyer (Rémy Girard) reads the will of a late client to her grown-up daughter and son.  The lawyer’s name is Jean Lebel.  The testatrix, Nawal Marwan, an Arab immigrant to Canada, was also for many years Lebel’s secretary.  Her will charges twin siblings Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette) to track down a brother they didn’t know they had, and their father, whom they assumed was dead.  Nawal has left two letters, one to be delivered to each of the lost brother and father.  The will also refers cryptically to her failure to keep a promise.  This can be redeemed only by delivery of the letters, as instructed.  Unless that happens, Nawal requests that she be buried naked in the earth, sans coffin or gravestone.  Jeanne immediately accepts the curious assignment.  Simon, who doesn’t remember his mother fondly, declines it.

    From this point Incendies, in Villeneuve and Valérie Beaugrand-Champagne’s adaptation, proceeds as a dual narrative.  Jeanne travels to Nawal’s native country in the Middle East.  Her experiences there, as she pursues her unpromising quest, alternate with flashbacks to her mother’s pre-Canada past.  Nawal (Lubna Azabal), raised as a Christian, fell in love with a refugee, and pregnant with his child.  Her appalled family murdered her lover and planned to execute Nawal as an honour killing.  With the help of her grandmother (Majida Hussein), she escaped to the city of Daresh and became a student there.  Her baby boy was taken from her and placed in an orphanage, later destroyed in a national civil war.  After surviving an attack by Christian nationalists on a bus on which she was travelling – most of the passengers were Muslim refugees – Nawal joined the Muslim side in the war.  She assassinated a nationalist leader and was imprisoned.  In jail, she became known as ‘the woman who sings’; a main reason for her singing was to drown out the cries of other prisoners undergoing torture.  Nawal was raped in her cell, and impregnated, by the most notorious torturer, Abou Tarek (Abdelghafour Elaaziz), and gave birth to twins.  On her release from prison, she took them to Canada.

    It will be obvious from the above that the Middle Eastern country in the story goes unnamed (locations within it – Daresh and so on – have invented names).  It will be nearly as obvious, even so, that the country is Lebanon and the conflict based on the Lebanese Civil War that began in 1975 and continued for fifteen years.  In not identifying the country, Villeneuve is reflecting Wajdi Mouawad’s original but he also told S&S that he wanted ‘an imaginary space like Costa-Gavras’s Z [1969] so as to free it from any political bias’.  This is an odd comparison to make – certainly an odd reason to make it.  Z begins with a kind of anti-disclaimer – ‘Any resemblance to actual events or to persons living or dead is not coincidental.  It is intentional’.  The resemblances are to recent Greek political history and history-makers:  Costa-Gavras’s kinetic thriller gained substance from his evident antipathy to the ‘regime of the Colonels’ that ruled Greece at the time Z was made and released.

    The flashbacks in Incendies are meant to reflect what the daughter, on her travels and through her various enquiries, discovers of the mother’s past.  The sequences in which Jeanne herself features are well done – particularly a visit to the community in which Nawal was raised, and which hasn’t forgotten her scandalous behaviour – but they’re inevitably overshadowed by the brutality witnessed or experienced by Nawal.  Once Simon has been persuaded by his sister to join the search, and flies over from Canada with Jean Lebel, this narrative balance changes.  Although there are still flashbacks, the emphasis is increasingly on solving a mystery rather than depicting war and war crimes – which Villeneuve, his DP André Turpin and his editor Monique Dartonne have done so powerfully.  One’s shocked and impressed by the cleverness of the culminating revelation in the story but the shock is of a different order from that of the graphic scenes of carnage.   And in the light of those scenes, it feels wrong now to be thinking, ‘Oh, that’s clever’.

    The mystery’s solution is planted in the opening minutes, before the action switches to the very different environment of Lebel’s office.  After presenting a long shot of a peaceful Levantine landscape, the camera focuses on a group of very young children whose heads are being shaved, and is magnetised by the face of one boy (Hussein Sami), who stares back angrily.  The camera also picks up a pattern of three dots on the boy’s ankle – the same pattern that we learn was tattooed on Nawal’s illegitimate son Nihad before they were separated.  Although his orphanage was razed by Muslim militant Chamseddine, children there, including Nihad, were converted to Islam and trained to be child soldiers.  While fighting in the civil war as a young man, Nihad was captured by nationalists, and turned again.  He changed his name to Abou Tarek, became the torturer in the jail where Nawal was imprisoned.  After the civil war, he too was enabled to resettle in Canada.  Decades later (as a rare flashback to her later life reveals), Nawal is swimming in a public pool in Montreal.  Pausing in the water to get her breath, she notices three dots on the ankle of a man standing poolside.  When she sees his face, she recognises her rapist from the prison.  The twins’ half-brother is also their father.  The two letters their mother has written are to be delivered, back in Canada, to the same person.

    There are things in Incendies that bring to mind a Victorian novel – the catalytic reading of a will with singular provisions, a unique physical characteristic that establishes identity, the revelation of astonishing blood relationships and the literally heart-stopping effect of such a revelation. (Soon after the swimming-pool encounter, Nawal suffers a stroke and dies.)   Even though some of the plot twists – like the involuntary dual conversion of Nihad/Abou Tarek, who becomes more hate-filled with each new incarnation – make a strong political point, the melodramatic coincidences serve to reinforce the mismatch of the film’s modern Middle East warfare and family secrets aspects.

    There are a few more directly unsatisfying elements.  Once Simon and Lebel arrive on the scene, the journey to the whole truth, in which Simon’s interview with the elderly Chamseddine (Mohamed Majd) is pivotal, seems, if not rushed, too straightforward.  Allowing that he’s obviously some years the senior of Jeanne and Simon, Nihad looks a bit too old – thirtyish – when he rapes the woman that he doesn’t realise is his mother.   We hear, as we obviously need to hear, Nawal’s voiceover reading the contents of the letters eventually handed to Nihad by the twins:  one letter expresses undying contempt for the rapist-father, the other undying love for Nawal’s son.  It was probably a mistake, though, to show the recipient’s face as, alone in his room, he reads the letters.  The actor concerned, who’s had very little screen time other than for the rape scene, is set an impossible task of silently reacting to them.

    I’ve spent too much time accentuating the negative.  There’s some truly imaginative, as well as accomplished, film-making in Incendies.  One memorable instance is the pattern of water sequences – a flashback to the twins’ against-the-odds survival shortly after birth, the swim they take together in a pool after learning about this, the connection of this to the other swimming pool where Nawal confronts the tattooed ankle.  In a strong cast, Lubna Azabal is outstanding and thoroughly credible (except, in a ten-second scene, when Nawal is on her deathbed:  this is the fault not of the actress but of a bad wig).  Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin is excellent, too.  It’s not easy to get out of your head the sound of Jeanne’s sharp intake of breath – nearly a stifled scream – when Simon wonders aloud, ‘One plus one, does it make one?’, and the penny drops.

    17 September 2021

    [1] I’ve not seen Blade Runner 2049 (2017) or Enemy (2013).  (The latter, with an international cast headed by Jake Gyllenhaal, is, according to Wikipedia, a Canadian-Spanish rather than an American film.)

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