Blazing Saddles (1974) Review

Blazing Saddles

Director: Mel Brooks
Writer: Andrew Bergman / Mel Brooks / Richard Pryor / Norman Steinberg / Alan Uger
Producer: Michael Hertzberg
Studio: Warner Bros.
Stars: Cleavon Little, Gene Wilder, Harvey Korman, Madeline Kahn, Slim Pickens, Mel Brooks
Length: 93 min
Genre: Comedy
MPAA Rating: R
My Rating: ****
Oscar Nominations: Supporting Actress (Kahn), Editing, Original Song (“Blazing Saddles”)
Nightbird Nominations: Original Screenplay, Supporting Actress (Kahn), Original Song (“Blazing Saddles”)

Normally, to call a director’s sense of humor juvenile would be a bad thing. Not so with Mel Brooks.

Even when certain lines reek of immaturity and unoriginality (such as Lili Von Shtupp’s curiosity concerning the rumor about black men), it is done so sincerely that we can’t help but admire it. Only he could make the fireside flatulence scene an example of comedy at its finest instead of just being an unfortunate exercise in crude excess.

I would describe the premise of Blazing Saddles, but it hardly matters. The rather flimsy plot merely serves as a vehicle for the sight gags and great lines that are featured in abundance. To describe the barebones of the story would be to completely ignore wonderful characters like the Waco Kid (played by a marvelously burned-out Gene Wilder) and Lili Von Shtupp (Madeline Kahn, a very surprising but richly-deserving Oscar nominee for her performance here), as well as the many wonderful comic routines that have absolutely nothing to do with the film’s overall objective.

This is the key to Blazing Saddles: it does not function as a film with a story, but more as several loosely-connected sketches that have been strung together to create an in-cohesive whole.

Certainly that was what Brooks was hoping for when, instead of writing the screenplay himself as had previously been his practice, he hired an entire committee of writers who could contribute lines and situations to the script. This was a setup similar to the one employed for Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows,” for which Brooks was a staff writer.

The film’s laugh-a-minute pace owes itself to this unusual process; how else could one film hope to feature choreographed farting, a Marlene Dietrich sendup, a governor by the name of LePetomane (French for The Fartmaster), a pie fight, and the most outrageous Hollywood satire ever tacked-on to the end of a major motion picture if not by receiving contributions from more than one writer?

But despite the many writers and their enormous contribution to this wonderful filmic achievement, the bulk of the credit still goes to Mel Brooks. In a way, it has to, just as any comedy film of a grab-bag nature made in the intervening years owes its very existence to Mel. He created this mini-genre and made it palatable, which is more than anyone else could’ve done.

His films are always quick-witted, fun little romps that are jam-packed with gags that one suspects he picked up on the playground. But it is just that sense of playfulness, the suspicion that he spends his time behind the camera giggling to himself at his naughtiness that allows his films to work in the way that they do. He has such an infectious appreciation for comedy that one suspects that he could make anyone feel special just by hitting them over the head with a rubber chicken.