Blazing Saddles
(1974)
comedy western
directed
by : Mel Brooks
featuring
: Cleavon Little - Gene Wilder - Slim Pickens - Harvey Korman - Mel Brooks
running
time : 1 hour 45 minutes
Vulgar, crude, and occasionally scandalous
in its racial humor, this hilarious bad-taste spoof of Westerns, co-written
by Richard Pryor, features Cleavon Little as the first black sheriff of
a stunned town scheduled for demolition by an encroaching railroad. Little
and co-star Gene Wilder have great chemistry, and the delightful supporting
cast includes Harvey Korman, Slim Pickens, and Madeline Kahn as a chanteuse
modelled on Marlene Dietrich. As in Young Frankenstein (1974), Silent Movie
(1976), and High Anxiety (1977), director/writer Mel Brooks gives a burlesque
spin to a classic Hollywood movie genre; in his own manic, Borscht Belt
way, Brooks was a central player in revising classic genres in light of
Seventies values and attitudes, an effort most often associated with such
directors as Robert Altman and Peter Bogdanovich. Some of this film's sequences,
notably a gaseous bean dinner around a campfire, have become comedy classics.
Brooks at his ribald, tasteless
best, Blazing Saddles stands out as one of the all-time great film spoofs.
Sparing no one from his outrageous brand of humor, Brooks proved he was
an egalitarian when it came to making fun of people, regardless of skin
color or religious persuasion: where blacks may come off as stereotypical,
whites are seen as just plain stupid and ignorant. Beyond its over-the-top
humor and genre revision of the Western, Blazing Saddles boasts some great
performances, with Kahn, Wilder, and Pickens doing some of the best work
of their careers. It also features a number of scenes that have elevated
the film into the realm of the comedy classic, perhaps most infamously
the one involving beans, a campfire, and the most gratuitous display of
flatulence ever to cloud a movie screen.