Banzé no Oeste

Blazing Saddles is one of the funniest movies to not only to come from Mel Brooks, but from cinema itself. Film stars Cleavon Little as a regular black laborer, but then a villain (Heldey Lamarr is perfectly played by Harvey Korman) wants to move a community out of the town Rockridge. So, he brings Cleavon in to make the people leave (the people in town are racist including the line: "The sherrif is a nig! "What'd he say?" "He said the sherrif's a near). Funny story, funny jokes (the farting sequence is ahead of it's time for 1974) and 2 breakthroughs- Madedline Kahn in a Oscar nominated performance as Von Shtupp and shines through. The other is Richard Pryor, who co-writes the script with Brooks and Andrew Bergman. Hilarious, forever. A+

The American Film Institute did not choose this as one of the 100 best American Movies of all time. They put Doctor Zhivago near the top of the list.

For these actions, all members of the institute should be stripped of rank, held somewhere with their eyes fixed open ala Clockwork Orange, and forced to watch the abysmal Zhivago until they change their minds.

Film "authorities" have these opinions that 1)great comedies inherently have less merit than serious films 2)great comedies aren't those actual funny ones, but are those stylish character-based films like Tootsie and It Happened One Night.

Blazing Saddles is one of the funniest movies ever made. It is a great parody. It has a gentle, loving spirit. People talk about it years after seeing it.

Sure, it is coarse, lowbrow, sometimes sophomoric, and silly. But it's funny, dammit. Isn't that what makes a great comedy.

I place it up there with Duck Soup - in comedy heaven.

Quality. many people who love this film may feel that the negative comments from others are inoffensive as this is such a funny film, I will say this. They are entitled to their opinions ...even if they are wrong. This is one of the best comedies ever made.

Firstly it's not just Mel Brooks as scriptwriter which seems to make a big difference to the quality of the film he produces (Yung Frankestein is co-written by Gene Wilder) but then you have a cast in fine form, especially Harvey Corman as the fantastic Hedley Lamarr (Not Hedy, It's Hedley!) add to that a fantastic series of sight gags and word play, with a good dose of racism ridicule thrown in for good measure (...and they is so DUMB!)and it all makes for a brilliant mix of inspired film-making.

There are numerous scenes of note, but the scene of the townsfolk looking at their work and Bart chasing after the bad guy still makes my skin cold as they are genuinely moving moments.

best visual gag though has got to be the Wako Kid versus the goons at the railroad top drawer Much Love Mike

Mel Brooks found a way in 1974 to direct two of the greatest comedies of all time. And in that one year, he found a way to cram as many movie parodies, and not have any overlap, as any director can in Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles. What Young Frankenstein was to the 1930s horror movies Blazing Saddles was to the Westerns of the 1960s. And add in there the oppression of blacks during the same time, and you have a biting satire on the role of blacks in society, if not in 1974, at least the way it was in 1874. Cleavon Little (by the way, he's black) plays Bart, a slave laborer for Hedley Lamarr's (Harvey Korman in a GREAT performance as a scheming government employee) railroad who needs to cut through the town of Rock Ridge for completion. The townspeople won't sell their land, so Lamarr has the sheriff killed and replaced with Bart. He's not really welcomed into the town, but with help from Jim, the Waco Kid (Gene Wilder) he is able to earn's the town's trust. Standard plot, and a plot that does not really matter. The humor is so scatological, from so many periods of time, that we know it's a movie, and the characters in the movie know they are in a movie. Take Slim Pickens when he cries out "What in the wide world of sports is going on here?" And the final 10 minutes of the movie is just odd in any other movie, but somehow works in Blazing Saddles. So much humor is cut out of the TV versions, so don't waste your time with it. It has to be seen with the language and "sexually suggestive" scenes to be fully appreciated.

A new sheriff is needed in Rock Ridge to clear away a team of local land grabbers out to lay a new railroad. The man in charge (Korman) needs the sheriff to fail so sends a black sheriff (Little) to the racist town.

Utterly over the top, crazed western full of the most wonderfully faux racist, sexist and slapstick comic set pieces made by Brooks. Korman is a glorious villain, Kahn hilarious as the Dietrich type sent to seduce Little and Wilder is as great as ever as the alcoholic quick draw. The whole film is riddled with hysterical scenes and rarely does Brooks miss a beat - possibly his 'Gov' piece is a bit lame, but otherwise it's Brooks best film apart from Young Frankenstein.