Review of Blazing Saddles (1974) by Adam H — 30 Apr 2010

N July of 1974, Mel Brooks sat in the screening room at Warner Bros anxiously watching the assembled executives who were about to view his recently completed Western spoof, Blazing Saddles. He was desperately in need of a hit. His debut movie, The Producers, had been a minor success despite being decried by some critics as "too Jewish" and "over manic", but his follow-up, The Twelve Chairs, had been an unmitigated flop.

Ninety or so minutes of glacial silence later, after the blank-faced bigwigs had exited the screening room, Brooks reasoned that he was in big trouble. The critical response on the film's release was hardly more encouraging. "What I found amazing was that, in one of our better theatres, a civilised-looking audience laughed loudest and longest at a scene in which a bunch of cowboys sit around a campfire eating beans," declared a horrified John Simon. "One after another, they raise their backsides a bit and break wind, each a bit louder than his predecessor. If this is what makes audiences happiest, all future for the cinema is gone with the wind." (All fart gags in Simonís view being equal, but some apparently more equal than others) Of course, it was exactly what delighted audiences. Brooks' wholehearted embracing of rank vulgarity, together with his innovative quickfire sketch structure, titillated crowds more used to sophisticated Hollywood humour and, with its sheer quantity of gags, left them breathless; if one zinger misfired, there was sure to be another mere seconds away. Uniquely for a spoof, and certainly unique in Mel Brook's oeuvre, it has a darkly angry heart. It is a film about real bigotry, a phony West and the unreliability of movies as repositories for a shared history. "The official movie portrait of the West is simply a lie. I figured my career was finished anyway, so I wrote berserk, heartfelt stuff about white corruption and racism and Bible-thumping bigotry." Stands next to Young Frankenstein as Brooks' best movie, and, of course, boasts the god of all fart gags.