Review of Blazing Saddles (1974) by Joe E — 25 Feb 2015

Among my fondest youthful memories is sitting in a movie theater in the rural farm town east of San Diego where I grew up, watching "Blazing Saddles" for the first of many, many times. A stereotypical cinematic flashback of an equally stereotypical "Indian raid": the chief (Mel Brooks) and his lieutenants approach a solitary covered wagon and its occupants, a terrified black couple and their little boy (who will grow up to be our protagonist, Bart). "Schvartzes!" he exclaims. I fall, quite literally, out of my chair onto the floor, convulsing. My bewildered friends stare, as the joke sails blithely over their heads. (Precious little Yiddish awareness in El Cajon, California in 1974.).

Flash forward 20 years: After numerous pleas, my teenaged son (who can't imagine that any movie his old man likes could hold the slightest interest for him), finally sits down to watch it with me, sighing, eyes rolling. A year later I search in vain for the DVD; he has taken it to college with him, to share with his frat brothers. Nowadays we shout our favorite lines together as they are delivered ("S'cuse me while I whip this out!") to my wife's eternal annoyance.

Very few movies make me laugh out loud, but "Blazing Saddles" does, every single time. It just does. Ironically, other than the "schvartzes" line and one or two others ("Nine's about my limit on schnitzengrubens"), I didn't find that first viewing all that funny, all those years ago. The ending, especially, was too ridiculous for words. Obviously it has grown on me -- or perhaps I've just caught up with Brooks and Richard Pryor (who deserves a lot more of the writing credit than he usually gets). Their masterpiece was decades ahead of its time in the deadly serious 1970s; no one ever had the inspiration -- much less the cojones -- to attack racism head on, much less with comedy, or to fill a movie with blatant anachronisms, or give all the townspeople the same surname, or even to portray a cacophony of flatulence around a campfire.

"Blazing Saddles" is one of those rare gems that cannot be imitated, nor even remade. (For starters, they would have to leave out the N-word. And then, you've got no movie.) In 100 years, it will be one of the few American movies remembered. And yes, the ending does work; oh yes, it does.