Last week Your Humble Narrator had the huge honor to introduce a showing of one of my very favorite movies, the Mel Brooks classic Blazing Saddles...
...at Western Spirit: Scottsdale's Museum of the West, and to lead the post-movie discussion. I'm delighted to say it seemed to go over great; the surprisingly large audience that turned out on a Thursday afternoon to watch a movie from 1974 laughed hard and left happy. Admittedly, a large majority of the crowd, based on a show of hands, had already seen it.
Here are the notes I prepared for my intro:
The danger in discussing Blazing Saddles with people who have never seen it is that of overselling it. It doesn't need to be taken as anything but a very silly, strange and surreal low-comedy send-up of Western movies, especially of the "socially conscious" 50s-era sort like Broken Arrow and Johnny Guitar, with dashes of other classics like Destry Rides Again. The jokes are TV sketch comedy in style, heavy-handed and brash, at times almost childlike. Even the potty-mouth profanities and obscenities, scandalous at the time, and the racial epithets--far more scandalous nowadays--have the quality of adolescent showing off.
But I love the film, because of its heart. It's not as confident and well-made a piece cinema as the next Brooks film, Young Frankenstein, which came out later that same year. But great as Young Frankenstein is, i think the more ragged Blazing Saddles is funnier, and more moving, because it engages with racial conflicts that are painfully perennial in American society. These jokes were as relevant in 1974 as they would have been in 1874, and they're still infuriatingly relevant to our time. The freewheeling use of epithets can be hard on the contemporary ear, and today's audiences may also squirm at the gay stereotypes near the end. But while I'm not remotely comparing the stature of Blazing Saddles to that of Huckleberry Finn, the two works have this much in common: they never use those words for any reason other than to make racists look idiotic.
Finally I would like to mention that the film is full of wonderful acting. Brooks has said that Cleavon Little wasn't his first choice the hero Bart; he wanted Richard Pryor, who worked on the screenplay. But great as Pryor would likely have been, Little's warmth and openhearted cheeriness is irresistible. The supporting players, from Harvey Korman's sneering villain Hedley Lamarr to Brooks himself as the befuddled Governor to Alex Karras as the eloquent Mongo to Slim Pickens with his hilariously aggrieved line readings to the great David Huddleston, who memorably enacts the exact moment when a lifelong bigot finally gets tired and gives up on racism.
But two members of the cast are transcendent: Gene Wilder gives one of the most relaxed and lovable expressions of his persona, that peerless combination of gentleness and strangled volatility. And Madeleine Khan is angelic as the Dietrich-esque chanteuse Lilli von Schtupp; her marvelous number "I'm Tired" may be the high-water mark of her career. And now that I've thoroughly oversold it, here, from Warner Brothers in 1974, is Blazing Saddles.
I would also note that a middle-aged guy in the audience, alluding to my mention of the uncomfortable--though obviously affectionate--gay stereotypes in the film, dismissed the concern with "Nah, I'm gay and I love them."
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