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Blazing Saddles wasn’t the first Mel Brooks film: that honor goes to The Producers. However, Blazing Saddles was Brooks’ first film that was a blockbuster success. Being a Mel Brooks film, it’s a parody of a specific genre: jokes strung together by a loose plot. For this movie, it’s a parody on the Western genre with the plot of Cleavon Little as the first Black sheriff of a town in the West. Gene Wilder is a drunken gunslinger and Mel Brooks is the mayor of the town who hires Madeline Kahn to vamp the new sheriff. Considering when it was made, Blazing Saddles still holds up to be pretty funny today. Some of the jokes might seem racist, it is because the are only racist on the surface—underneath is the satire on race relations of the time the film was made. This isn’t my favorite Mel Brooks movie (that honor would probably either go to Spaceballs, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, or The Producers) and it isn’t the worst one either (Dracula: Dead and Loving It or History of the World Part I[although some of the jokes worked in both those movies]). Blazing Saddles is definitely worth a rental if you haven’t seen it before, especially if you’re a fan of Mel Brooks movies. A lot of the humor is dated, but it still is a million times funnier than many recent comedies such as Tomcats.
I give Blazing Saddles **1/2 out
of ****. Blazing Saddles in an old Mel Brooks movie, that parodies western movies. An evil railroad company owner is trying to get a hold of some land. In order to get the land for really cheap, he hires a group of outlaws to wreck havok on a local town. Mel Brooks plays the unintelligent mayor who appoints a black sheriff to clean up the town. Although I did find a couple of the jokes in this movie funny, the majority of it was crap. What bugs me about Mel Brooks is chow unfunny he gets. A movie isn't funny, if there are about 3-5 painfully bad jokes, for every funny one. Comedies aren't supposed to make you cringe. I also find it annoying, when in almost every role the Mel Brooks has been in, he feels the need to point out that he's Jewish. Repeatedly. And it's not like I have a problem with him being Jewish, or perhaps playing Jewish roles. But regardless of what role he's in, he always seems to speak a bunch of Yiddish. This is one of the most over-rated
"comedies" from one of the most over-rated "film-makers". |