Once Upon a Time… Blazing Saddles

There are many professionals of the filmmaking business who stated to no surprise that comedies are very difficult to make if there’s not enough passion, creativity and, above all, a gift for the job. These are all essential requirements for dramatic pictures, but it’s much easier to get a comedy wrong because the line that divides the erroneous search for laughter and true comical art and/or entertainment is drastically thinner. Mel Brooks – a polyvalent director whose greatest achievement, in my humble opinion, was marrying Anne Bancroft – knew so and yet liked to go extremely close to this line in his films, motivating critics to divide his filmography between splendorous silliness and terrible silliness. It’s still hard to take his films too seriously, especially as they grow older, but they’re still delightful fun rides.

If many directors enjoy composing their own cinematic essays on the film business and the process of moviemaking, Mel Brooks always liked to go beyond that and reach for the grounds of parodying. As obvious as it is from the very first shot, Blazing Saddles turns the world of the Wild West upside down, as the ruthless Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman, one of Brooks’s favorites) decides to take control of the city of Rock Ridge in order to buy its land, which will lay along the new railroad on construction. Lamarr spots an opportunity when he meets Bart (Cleavon Little), a black man who becomes the new sheriff of Rock Ridge under Lamarr’s invisible influence upon the state’s governor. Not only this sets one of the movie’s main premises – that Western films often show obscure racism and overly dramatizes the violence of the period -, it’s also a visible pathway for multiple references to old classics, especially Once Upon a Time in the West, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Cimarron and The Grapes of Wrath.

Blazing Saddles is a traditional Mel Brooks picture, and this is fairly clear from head to tail: among other signature approaches from his comedies, Harvey Korman plays one of his many annoying, unlikable villains (not unlikable because of their malevolence, but simply because they never manage to be any interesting); the use of pacing pauses for the most important jokes never fails, and Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder have a very delightful chemistry as the leading pair of good guys; historical inaccuracies blend with the story in a way that they become essential, often displaying several careful jokes and a few exaggerated ones. I take it as a debatable preference, but the most interesting character by far is the Waco Kid (Gene Wilder), the unforgettable reference to the heroic leading man in most Westerns, who’s always the fastest shooter, the most quotable man and the man with the strongest principles. Smartly played by Wilder, the Waco Kid never ceases to amaze, not because he’s an average cowboy or a badly trained one; on the contrary, he’s impossibly skillful to the point that Clint Eastwood looks like (censored due to the editor’s fear that he may come and make us the other kind of people in this world).

Perhaps not as great a comedy as many remember it, Blazing Saddles is nevertheless a great popcorn-friendly movie, surprising for its fancy silliness and entertaining for its best moments. It’s a film that’s even more nostalgic when compared to present parody movies, which never get the whole purpose of parody as correctly and carefully as Mel Brooks did in his movies, as disappointing as some of them are.

Blazing Saddles

Year: 1974

Director: Mel Brooks

Cast: Cleavon Little, Gene Wilder, Mel Brooks, Madeline Kahn, Harvey Korman

Academy Awards: Best Supporting Actress (Madeline Kahn, nominated); Best Film Editing (nominated); Best Original Song (nominated)