Essential Cinema: Blazing Saddles

The jokes in Blazing Saddles have aged like a fine wine and the influence the movie had on the last 38 years of comedy is undeniable

Any column dedicated to classic cinema has to honour and embrace movies that break boundaries. Well, today we have a film that broke one of the most important boundaries in film history. Sure, bathroom humor existed before Blazing Saddles, but nothing like the extent and scale of Mel Brooks epic cowboy campfire fart-a-long. Strange though it may seem now, that was controversial at the time and was silenced for the TV version that awkwardly featured cowboys shifting in their seats without the explanatory sounds. Okay, so maybe that’s a dubious first that many film historians wish had never been pioneered, but thankfully that’s not all that Blazing Saddles has to offer. An indispensable influence on all parody movies to follow and an incendiary racial satire using the delightful bigotry of classic Hollywood’s favorite B-movie genre as a jumping off point, the movie remains one of the great comedies for more reasons than being an ass gas landmark (though that certainly doesn’t hurt).

The plot is about as nonsensical as Mel Brooks gets (and that’s saying a lot), but let’s give a summary a shot. There are some sketchy land developers led by Hedly Lamarr (Harvey Korman) who are looking to run a railroad through the town of Ridge Rock and want to drive the residents out. They’ve done everything possible to terrorize the community (including stampeding the women and raping the cattle according to the scared town folk) and their most dastardly plan is to hire a black man as the town’s new sheriff named Black Bart (Cleavon Little). They are convinced the town will revolt, but instead Bart gets them all on his side, hiring a drunken sharpshooter (Gene Wilder) as his deputy and seducing the local mankiller Lili Von Shtupp (Madeline Kahn doing her best Marlene Dietrich) in the process. Soon Bart hatches a scheme to create an exact copy of Ridge Rock to fool the developers’ mad mob and from there things get a little silly (well, sillier) as the brawl leaks across into movies shooting in neighboring studios and a Blazing Saddles screening. Okay, this is getting tough to describe.

Blazing Saddles is a product of Mel Brooks at his most crazed, a rambling collection of jokes and Western references willing to do anything for a laugh. As his career wore on, that approach led to messier, less consistent movies like Spaceballs or Robin Hood: Men In Tights. Then after the ZAZ writing/directing team took Mel’s style in their own direction with Airplane!, these sorts of Mad Magazine parody movies became a genre unto themselves and not a very good one. Yet despite the decades of copies, Blazing Saddles still stands as the best of the form. Part of that was probably due to Brooks’ genuine love for the genre he didn’t have in later outings. Part of it was because he had a budget and wide crew of Western veterans to recreate the visuals and world with a richer authenticity than most parody movies. But the most important element was definitely the script. This wasn’t just a collection of pop culture jokes strung together on a popular genre form (well, don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty of that), it was also a fairly radically anarchistic comedy dealing with material that Hollywood had never dared to touch for a laugh. 

When the movie came out in 1974, American comedy was about to change forever. A new form of subversive comedy was building steam through stand up, The Second City, and National Lampoon magazine that was about to hit the mainstream with Saturday Night Live. Brooks was deep into the Hollywood establishment at that point, yet had already shown plenty of desire to outrage in The Producers that he took to a new level in Blazing Saddles. The constant use of the n-bomb and other racial slurs is just as radical today and at the time the lewd sexual humor was pretty out there as well. While much of the comedic effect was just about shock, there is also rather pointed commentary on the implicit racism in most Westerns.

There’s some clever stuff in there and some achingly funny material that stings, much of which can be attributed the involvement of Richard Pryor as co-writer. Pryor was just coming into his own as a wild man social commentator and self-destructive autobiographer and his comedy can be felt within Brooks’ Western romp. The only thing that really brings the movie down is the fact that Pryor wasn’t able to play the lead role as intended because the studio was worried about his, shall we say, recreational habits. Cleavon Little is fine in as Back Bart, but he’s a little flat while Pryor would have brought more to the performance. It also would have been the first Gene Wilder/Richard Pryor big screen pairing and by default their finest movie.

Fortunately, Wilder is at least at the center and really is the perfect actor for Brooks’s brand of comedy. He can do ridiculous slapstick when required, but it’s his ability to commit to the most absurd sequences with a deadpan dramatic approach that’s often even funnier. Aside from Madeline’s Kahn’s hysterical work in a small role (which nabbed her a rare Oscar nomination for a purely comedic performance) and Brooks’ several cameo appearances, the rest of the cast is rounded out primarily with longtime Western character actors like Slim Pickens. In this type of surrealist parody comedy, that’s always the best way to cast. When the writing is this outrageous, the acting doesn’t need to be. As deliberately messy and haphazard the film can feel, it’s also one of Brooks’ most stylistically accomplished movies. Coming at a time when he was one of the most bankable comedy minds around, he shot in cinemascope on grand sets filled with extras. That attention to detail adds a lot to Blazing Saddles‘ success as a film (as opposed the community access television special effects in some parts of Spaceballs) while the satirical streak acknowledging the absurdity of racism adds just enough intelligence to elevate the material above guilty pleasure status.  Most comedies don’t age well as that form is constantly evolving and transforming old laugh factories into boring relics. Not Blazing Saddles, the jokes have aged like a fine wine and the influence the movie had on the last 38 years of comedy is undeniable. Plus, that farting scene is pretty great too.

Blazing Saddles Will Screen At The Scotiabank Theatre on Wednesday June 13, 2012

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Phil Brown writes about film for Toronto Standard.