Blazing Saddles

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.

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.

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.

Whenever I look at this film I laugh so hard that somtimes tears come to my eyes. Brooks manages to do with this film what Young Frankenstien did to classic horror films. The thing that really works is all the in jokes laced throughout the film. This shows that the cast and crew were really having fun in writing and producing this film. But the main credit should go to the late Cleavon Little. He was perfect as Bart. He took the role when many thought it should have gone to Richard Pryor (who was a co-writer on the film). However, I think Pryor might have been a little too over the top for the role. Little played it more low key and not as militant as Pryor might have.

Also, this film was rated R when it was first released back in 1974. Today it probably would get either a P.G. or, at most, a P.G.-13 rating.

In its side-splitting takedown of racism and all-purpose ignorance, 1974's "Blazing Saddles" is one of the boldest and most important satires ever made. As raunchy and as ludicrous as it is whip-smart, it can claim parentage of modern-day parodies from "South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999)" to "Sausage Party (2016)" to music industry spoof "Stadium Anthems (2018)" in their uses of obscenity, intelligence, and song to expose inane social truths.

It's the Wild West. Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman) is a white business opportunist with moronic and hyper-sexed governor William J. LePetomane (Mel Brooks) in his back pocket. Lamarr wants to build a railroad through the outpost town of Rock Ridge. When he can't scare off the town folk, he incites chaos by saddling them with a black sheriff (Bart, played by the now-iconic Cleavon Little), who just days before was a railroad laborer sentenced to hanging. It turns out that the sly Bart is a rare sage in a frontier littered with dumb white people; he pairs with booze-soaked gunslinger Jim (Gene Wilder) to rally the town against Lamarr's thugs.

Wearing no seatbelt, "Blazing Saddles" rebukes the absurdity of racism with its own absurdist countermeasures. While its blueprint would never make it past present-day studio tastemakers, its defrocking of ignorance has never been better primed for mass consumption. This is a watershed comedy that presides atop any short list of film's greatest satires. - (Was this review of use to you? If so, let me know by clicking "Helpful." Cheers!)