"You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know… morons."
It’s time to look at a rather seminal entry by legendary comic director Mel Brooks—the ultimate Brooklyn wiseguy, he kicked off his main cinematic career with The Producers, an eerily prophetic film about creators sabotaging their own release just for a cash dump. As if that could ever happen, eh, Warner Brothers? Anyhoo, Brooks at his peak took some iconic parodic stabs at mainstay films from Frankenstein to Star Wars (“They’ve got to plaid!”) and, with this one, helped kneecap an entire genre. It’s the film that helped along the collapse of the classic western with the rather profane Blazing Saddles.
Teaming up with era-defining comedian Richard Pryor, Brooks here takes in a very loosely historical version of 1874, where a corrupt and incredibly hammy attorney general Hedley (or Hailey!) Lamar, as played by Harvey Korman, seeks to dislodge the seemingly very inbred town of Rock Ridge to build a railroad. After hoodwinking the hopelessly corrupt state governor (Brooks himself), he manages to hatch a convoluted scheme to get black railroad worker Bart (Cleavon Little) to be installed as the town sheriff, whose fate will give him the pretext to move on in, or something. It really doesn’t matter a whole lot, and is essentially the excuse for a whole lot of gags and our creative minds taking a dump on the western itself—if with a smidge of affection!
And yes, it’s littered with slurs aplenty, with the most classic scene being Sheriff Bart riding into town to be greeted with agape stares and a very frosty reception. Here’s what keeps it all from getting a tad uncomfortable—it’s played all the way up to ludicrousness, with Brooks and company peeling away the at times rather sanitized images of the old west and cranking up the unsavoryness to show off just how silly it is. And, not long thereafter, the whole thing is very obviously at the expense of the rather racist townsfolk as Bart gets the better of them in the most over the top and hilarious way possible.
It’s important to remember just how brutal this was fifty years ago—very little is spared as so many aspects get mocked, like that aforementioned racism most Hollywood films at the time tried to gloss over (the Italian spaghetti westerns were a different deal). Back then you would often have Jewish people or Italians play Native Americans—so Brooks takes this to the logical extreme by having himself play the most Yiddish tribal chief possible. The blatant land grabbing by Manifest Destiny is mocked at, and the folksy image of settlers is, as noted above, hardly spared either—once again, this was pretty bold back in 1974.
Does it still work beside that? For the most part, I’d say so—just because how utterly gonzo it all gets. And, well, for the presence of Gene Wilder—one of the masters of deadpan that you might know as Willy Wonka, and who here plays a retired drunken gunfighter that, as he explains in the most dramatic scenery-tugging way, got shot in the ass once. If anything one of my flaws is that he’s a bit underused, though Brooks fixed that in the subsequent Young Frankenstein!
Some gags of course don’t work as well as others—there’s parts with the brute thug ‘Mongo’ that drag a little bit, and in a rapid-fire comedy like this you’re not getting gold all the time. But it all comes to a head in the last part which doesn’t so much break the fourth wall as completely obliterate it and leave the specks into dust. At this point, whatever craps to give the film has have all completely vanished into the wind like the desert sands themselves.
Brooks has mentioned in more recent years that he doesn’t think this film would get made now, for all the talk about what’s correct to show and whatnot—I’d say maybe so, but perhaps it’s more because the context has changed. Blazing Saddles was the film to tear into sanitized history and Hollywood versions back in the seventies, and ever since then, the western itself has been rather intermittent save for occasional entries that mark themselves somewhat, like the True Grit remake. Some of it remains funny, some of it might raise an eyebrow even with the context, but some things could only make their mark in a specific time and place regardless…whether it’s about fart jokes or American history.
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