Review of High Anxiety (1977) by Paul Z — 19 Oct 2010

With masterful lampoons and farces under his belt, Brooks took on the thornier and more restricted foil of Alfred Hitchcock films. With Broadway, vintage horror films, silents and westerns, the range is much broader. There is more material to subvert or play with. But Hitchcock's movies are already so particular and good-humored that there's scarce room for satire. The best Brooks can do is to place himself in the shower with a fuming bellhop outside the curtain, or scamper through the park with a throng of rancorous birds defecating on his suit. Most of this stuff isn't especially hilarious, however.

Just as one naturally associates Hitchcock with suspense plots, so does one put Brooks with screwball grab-bags, so there are good throwaway gags that compensate for the flat results of many focal jokes. For instance, the boxing match bit goes on just long enough. Instead of turning into a whole scene, it's a little aside. And fortunately Madeline Kahn eventually hops on the ship as love interest. Kahn is capable of some virtuoso arrangements within Brooks' sketchy characters and dialogue, and she frequently finds comedy gold with something as minuscule as a motion or a pause. To be sure, some of the smaller jokes work, and it's an generally affable minor-league attempt in Brooks' filmography, a pallid imitation of its untouchable predecessors.

There are three great sight gags in this less-than-sincere brand engagement to Hitchcock, all of which mock Hitchcock's voyeuristic camera. The remaining laughs have no pattern, as far as I can tell, in the Master's work, while riffs on trademark moments from Vertigo, Psycho and The Birds extract few sniggers. Choosing Spellbound as its starting gate, High Anxiety stars Brooks as acrophobic Dr. Thorndyke, the new Chief of Staff at The Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous. After arriving at some shady bookkeeping, Thorndyke is shuffled off to a psychiatric convention by the conniving Nurse Diesel, Cloris Leachman's funny distortion of Rebecca's Mrs. Danvers, and her masochistic sycophant Harvey Korman, where he meets Kahn, the obligatory blonde bombshell, and gets framed for murder.

I could pick away at the inconsistency of the movie's replication of its genre target and say things like composer John Morris emulates Franz Waxman better than he does Bernard Herrmann, but High Anxiety is substandard Brooks really because it functions on two categorically inconsistent ideas: that Hitchcock was a genre unto himself, and that scenery-chewing Brooks is a fitting proxy for Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant or Gregory Peck. It's problematical to parody an artist, at least in the revue manner of Brooks, because you're depending on images and iconography rather than formulas and standards, and it's trying to send up Hitchcock because he did it himself with North by Northwest, a post-modern farewell to his most prescribed trends. Kahn is a nod to prevalence that incongruously dates the movie more than alluding to an older picture would have, her look patterned on that of characters in Hitchcock's then-recent last films. Naturally, the prevalence of brown already locks the movie in 1977, ultimately making High Anxiety the cinematic parallel of a crooner's impersonator.