Young Frankenstein (though not a real Mel Brooks movie. Directed by him but written by Gene Wilder)
Blazing Saddles
High Anxiety (haven’t seen it in years, my opinion may be different now)
The Producers (have not seen the new one. Saw it on B’way with the original cast and loved it).
Silent Movie, History of the World, Space Balls: all on the same level, funny in parts but not good movies as a whole (loved the John Hurt cameo in Spaceballs).
Life Stinks: I can’t think of anything good or bad to say. Just a bland movie.
Men in Tights and Dead and loving it: embarrassingly bad
So where would all of you place his When Things Were Rotten TV show in here? That has always been one of my favorites, and was sorely disappointed when Men In Tights was released.
I’m surprised seeing any real vitriol here. I’m, in fact, saddened. Perturbed. Weeping as I type.
Blazing Saddles, IMHO, is his best & finest work. I don’t think you could even make this movie now. The racial stuff was and still is very risque, and is the most brutally honest & truthful racial comedy ever written by a white guy. I’d be curious to hear any challenges to this fact. Not to mention that Gene Wilder is pure comedic gold in that movie. Not only my favorite Brooks’ movie but in my Top Ten all time. Just nothing bad to say here.
The Producers, I think, was equally risque when it came out, but, as a twenty-something, it’s a bit dated to me.
Brooks’ style is unparrelled. It’s an all-out joke assault and sometimes I just laugh at the sheer volume of humor he’s peddling (Men in Tights, YF, & Spaceballs being perfect examples). Plus, he’s a punster. And there are oh-so-few of that sacred breed left.
The major problem with the later Brooks films is that he lost faith in his audience. The Producers, *The 12 Chairs * and *Blazing Saddles * (and yes, Young Frankenstein) are filled with subtle jokes as well as the obvious ones. Even as late as History of the World, he left the jokes up to the audience to get. Contrast this to say…Spaceballs or Men In Tights, where he not only telegraphed every joke, but then pounded them into the dirt.
There are certainly some subtle jokes in both Spaceballs & Men in Tights, just not as many as in the other films you mentioned. Hell, even the joke I mentioned in my last post (“What’s the matter Colonel Sanders? Chicken?”) is set up the whole entire movie then basically thrown away. I only noticed in on maybe my fifth viewing.
5.) To Be or Not To Be – really craxked me up. I like it even better than Lubitsch’s original (Sacrilege!)
6.) High Anxiety – great Hitchcock sendup, especially the camera tricks
7.) Silent Movie – any movie where Marcel Marceau gets the one and only spoken word deserves at least a mention, and there’s much more to it than that.
8.) Blazing Saddles – I thought this one was overrated. Good stuff, but nothing was as good as the original trailer for it, which I saw before I ever heard of the film. Hilarious.
9.) All the rest, most of which I haven’t seen all of – Robin Hood – MIT (Good for that one line – “Unlike other Robin Hoods, I speak with a British accent”), Dracula --DALI, Histotry of the World…
10,) Life Stinks
Brooks is credited as co-writer with Gene Wilder for both screenplay and screen story for Young Frankenstein. Wilder may have had the original idea, but the final work is due to their collaboration.
However, my point about it not being made these days still stands. Chapelle show, I’m afraid, does not reach the levels of comedy/honesty that this movie did. Just to preempt that argument, if you felt like making it.
I totally agree that it couldn’t be made these days – it’s brilliant, transgressive comedy that still has the power to shock. But it does seem worth mentioning that Brooks had a well-known (though not yet at that time) collaborator – who wasn’t allowed to play the Black Bart role.
wow that’s strong
I know there are people that don’t get him, or just don’t like his brand of humor. But “despise”? What has he down to generate such a reaction?
What’s the back story on that, exactly? Was it that Pryor was still deemed a little too…brutally honest? Just not famous enough? Nothing against Clevon Little, who did a damn fine job, but I’m curious.
AFAIK it was never made into a movie - but what about his work with Carl Reiner? The 2000 Year Old Man, and The 2013 Year Old Man?
CR: To what do you attribute your longevity?
2KYOM: Will ta live
CR: You have a very strong will to live?
2KYOM: No, Doctor Will Talive. Best doctor ever.
(or some such - it’s been years, decades even, since I’ve listened to it)
There were funnier bits, but that’s the one that stayed in my memory
As for Brooks’ films, in my “best” order:
Young Frankenstein
The Producers (1960’s)
Slient Movie
Blazing Saddles
Space Balls
then all the others
Brooks also produced My Favorite year, *Elephant Man * and Frances.
I think the decline started when he thought he could play the lead. YF is the best movie, but the one closest to my heart is Blazing Saddles. And while the Rpoducers is very good, it suffers greatly today from being too much a product of its time. Many movies from the late 60’s do this, so Mel wasn’t alone, to wit; trying too hard to be hip and, well… in tune with the young hippie generation.
Okay, what kind of a whoosh is this? How can you see the trailer for a film before you ever hear of the film? Isn’t the entire point of a film trailer to inform people that the film exists? What sort of sick mind game are you playing here, CalMeacham?
Shockingly and unprecedentedly, my fave of the Brooks filmography is **Blazing Saddles **. As funny as Richard Pryor was, and as much chemistry as he had with Gene Wilder in other films, I simply can’t see him bringing the same humor to the role of Bart as did the ultra-suave, sublimely urbane Cleavon Little. *“You’d do it for Randolph Scott!” * I was always sort of surprised that such a charismatic actor with a knack for comedy didn’t make more of a mark in cinema. It’s always a joy to see Harvey Korman working a jawful of scenery, and Slim Pickens as his thunderously oafish henchman also deserves a nod. But, of course the true star of the film is *Webster’*s Alex Karras as Mongo… Santa Maria! (It was years before I finally got that joke.) “Mongo only pawn in game of life.”
I enjoy **Young Frankenstein ** nearly as much; it’s not as fast and furious with the jokes, but it does a wonderful job of simultaneously lampooning and paying tribute to a relatively small group of films that most people are nonetheless familiar with. Such affectionate spoofing is a delicate balancing act that’s tricky to carry off consistently, as Brooks later demonstrated only too clearly with his later parodic offerings. The movie is as much a wonder for its meticulous evocation of the original films as it is a comedy in its own right. And of course, Brooks rightly observes that when performing experiments into the revivification of dead tissue, the only logical choice for your creation’s brain is that of Hans Delbruck, “scientist and saint.” It’s so obvious! So many brilliantly daft moments… I particularly enjoy Kenneth Mars as the Police Inspector, and his little game of cat-and-mouse with Wilder in the drawing room. crashMreeoowww!
Ditto. I also preferred Mel Brook’s version of To Be or Not To Be over the original. The scene of the group exiting the clown car dressed as clowns when the one refugee stopped in terror at the sight of all the Nazis was very moving, and actually painful to watch. As was the scene when the police came for Ann Bancroft’s gay dresser.
I should really see The Producers again. I’ve only seen it once, and I think I must have been too young to appreciate it. Except for the scenes of the play itself, it struck me as really boring.
For me, Brooks’ greatest film was Young Frankenstein, followed closely byBlazing Saddles. It’s interesting to speculate on what the movie would have been like with Pryor instead of Little. I don’t think it would have worked as well. Little had this great wholesome, matinee star look that Pryor lacked. He looked just like a straight shootin’ frontier lawman in the classic Hollywood mold - except that he was black. Which is, of course, the point of the whole film. As great as Pryor was, he never came across as heroic, which I think would be crucial to the role. (Not to say that Pryor himself wasn’t heroic in many ways. I’m just talking about his screen prescense.)
I liked High Anxiety (“I beeped?! Send me back to Russia! I beeped!”) pretty well. Not great, but enjoyable. I really loved To Be or Not to Be last time I saw it, which was about the same age I was when I saw The Producers. And Spaceballs, while corny as hell, just works for me. But it’s very borderline. There’s a lot of really stupid shit in that one, just barely counter-balanced by some real gems.
The rest of his stuff (excepting The 12 Chairs, which I haven’t seen) is just crap. You’ll be lucky to get one good, genuine laugh out of Robin Hood or Dracula. And for the love of God, someone get Brooks out from in front of the camera!
Actually, I’m confused by your confusion. I see trailers for films I’v never heard of before all the time – it’s often how I learn about the filom in the first place. Since “the entire point of a film trailer (is) to inform people that the film exists” it was, in fact, performing its function – informing me that the film existed, which I didn’t know before I saw the trailer. Simple, no? Or is this a whoosh of a whoosh?
The trailer I saw played it straight – they showed a wagon being surrounded by Indians, the family cowering in fear. As the camera comes in, you see they’re a black family. The lead Indian – Mel Brooks, although that wasn’t obvious with all the face paint – leans in closer for a look, then exclaims:
“Shvartzes!”
Thar; of course, is Yiddish for “Blacks”. I thought it was hilarious - it was the last thing I expeced out of the mouth of an American Plasins Indian, and it played into all those 19th century theories of Indians as dscendants of the Lost TRibes of Israel.
Aha! Trying to cover your tracks, eh Rasputin?! Don’t play the innocent here. You said you saw the trailer before you heard of the movie, which would not be the case if the trailer* informed * you of the movie, because you would be learning about the movie in the process of viewing said trailer… although I suppose since light travels faster than sound, then this might be interpreted as might be interpreted as lending a certain support to a strictly literal reading of your claim, since you would have “seen” the trailer fractionally more quickly than you “heard” of the movie… but this seems like an extremely roundabout way to state that you found the trailer funnier than the movie, so I naturally assumed that you were embedding a subliminal text layer of occult Masonic significance into your remarks. An hypothesis, I notice, that you have not denied!!!
Heh… I read that bit completely differently, as Brooks’ nod toward the old Hollywood tradition of employing people of totally non-Indian ethnicity-- often Jewish actors, but really just about anyone else except actual Native Americans-- to depict movie and TV Indians. By logical extension, then, it makes perfect sense that somewhere in the Hollywood Old West there’d be tribes of Indians that spoke fluent Yiddish.