Blazing Saddles If only Mel Brooks could make a fiercely
funny satire like Blazing Saddles again. After his late-seventies
peak, the poor guy seems to be slumming these days, what with
how Life Stinks, Robin Hood: Men In Tights and Dracula: Dead
and Loving It all turned out to be box-office schmucks. And
creativity-wise, only Men In Tights held up to Grandmaster
Melle Mel's earlier work, and even that may be because it
was basically "When Things Were Rotten: The Movie."
But I digress. Blazing Saddles is indeed
a comic gem, made in 1974 when Mel's brand of comedy was still
in vogue. Cleavon Little plays Bart, a black railroad worker
in 1874 whose act of rebellion against his abusive boss dooms
him to the hangman's noose, when all of a sudden a golden
opportunity drops into his lap... to become sheriff of the
small Colorado town of Rock Ridge.
That golden opportunity comes courtesy
of Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman), a shady, conniving member
of Governor LePetomane's administration (Le Petomane, French
for "fart master", played by Mel himself). As the
railroad is planned to cut through Rock Ridge, Hedley wants
the land to himself, so he schemes with a rogue gang of bandits
to terrorize the Rock Ridgers, so that they'll abandon their
town and leave all that valuable land to himself. When the
townsfolk petition their governor for a new sheriff, the job
of appointing one falls to Hedley, who fumes, "But law
and order is the LAST thing I need right now!"
- advertisement -
So he builds a new scheme: Appoint a sheriff
that will offend and divide the people and strike at them
while they're weakened as a community. Thus Bart dons the
tin star and reports for duty - much to the chagrin of the
lily-white citizens of Rock Ridge. The goings are rough at
first, but the new African-American sheriff slowly wins their
trust and admiration with the help of veteran gunslinger the
Waco Kid (Gene Wilder).
Hedley, seeing his brilliant plan backfire,
tries other ways to bring down the sheriff and the town, one
way by getting German burlesque performer Lily von Shtupp
(Madeline Kahn) to seduce Bart. As the standoff reaches its
climax, the film's action spills out of the movie itself and
into various parts of the Warner Bros. Studios.
The humor is broad, scatological, and
evenly distributed in terms of racial jokes. The N-word is
used quite frequently here, but that is offset by the relatively
dignified treatment that Mel gives the African-Americans.
Besides, Mel is an equal opportunity jokester - Orientals,
Irish, white supremacists and of course Jews are all targets
for his parodying. And in Blazing Saddles the laughs are kept
at a steady pace. This film will endure for ages to come as
one of Mel's signature works.
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