Blazing Saddles ****

Now, I'm sure you're going to say how can this dead guy like such a crude and disgusting movie? Doesn't he stand for old-fashioned values?

This site has nothing to do with wholesome movies or values of any kind (I actually tried to write an Andy Griffith death scene in one of my movies just for fun). All I care about is quality filmmaking and entertaining movies and trying to explain why movies back in the day were simply better than today.

Blazing Saddles may have been crude, but here's the rub, my darlings - there's a point to the crudeness. Not only is there a point, but the crudeness exposes those who are intelligent film viewers and the fungus growing out of a chair in the theatre.

For example, let's take the camp fire scene, shall we? For the fungi, the scene is a bunch of guys passing gas while they scream, "Funny. Funny. Do again. Do again," leading Darwin to desperately search for white-out.

Now for the intelligent film-goer, they would realize that all of the people around the camp fire were eating beans and would recall that beans seem to be the only item in the diet of most cowboys (at least as far as Westerns go). I actually can't recall seeing John Wayne eat anything but beans. How combustible must he have been? Now you figure with all that bean consumption, a scene like the one around the camp fire would have to take place at some point, so, what the hell? Mel Brooks decided to shoot the scene that must have been on the cutting room floor in The Searchers.

The movie is a satire, and making fun of such minor hypocrisies is what satire does. Satire is also a difficult thing to do, especially in the way that Brooks does it, tossing everything into the stew and hoping no one gets poisoned. I've always thought of Brooks in terms of baseball. Brooks probably has a gag every 10 seconds in one of his movies. If he hits 40 percent of them, it's a classic; 30 percent it's a good movie; 25 percent it's watchable; 20 percent or under and it's carbolic acid time. If he just hits 30 percent of the time, that's about 240 successful gags in a movie. Of course, you try writing 720 gags in a two-hour movie.

What Brooks does is not easy and it can (and has) lead to disaster (Robin Hood). Mel has two movies which climb over his 40 percent line - The Producers and this one. Even though I like The Producers more, I picked this one because it is a better example of Brooks's style of filmmaking and a better example for my little thesis here.

Blazing Saddles is much baser than The Producers. In retrospect, it seems like Brooks was behaving himself during The Producers until he had a success and once that movie became a big hit he was free to do what he wanted. Blazing Saddles takes place in 1874 in some former Wild West town that has been civilized. The government wants to build a train through the town and, Hedley Lamarr (yes, the joke is made often), a corrupt assistant to the governor, needs to find a way to get the people out of town, so he can buy the land cheaply and sell it back to the government. First, Lamarr sends a group of thugs to bully them out, but the townspeople hold their ground and ask the governor for a new sheriff. Lamarr convinces the governor to send a black man by telling him that he will be a hero to the civil rights movement (which was certainly important in a western town in 1874). The governor's not too bright, so he agrees. Lamarr hopes the presence of the new sheriff will finally drive everyone away.

Where's the satire here? Name me one black guy who has ever (EVER!!!) appeared in a western. And minstrels don't count. Yes, John Ford used Stephen Fetchit once but it wasn't a Western and it was Stephen Fetchit, so that doesn't count either.

There’s your plot. Now chaos ensues and somewhere in the next two hours a former football player hit a horse in the mouth. Why not?

Within all of this madness, the jokes keep coming back to making fun of the old Westerns and making fun of racism. My favorite bit in the movie is when Clevon Little, who plays the Sheriff, does an impersonation of Fetchit every time he gets into trouble. For some reason, each time Little does this gag, the people in the town forget they are mad at him and try to help the “poor Negro.”

Ironically, this style of movie led to a whole bunch of horrible rip-offs. I mean this style may be responsible for more bad movies (some of them Mel’s) in the past 30 years then any other one combined. But I'm not here to judge those movies, I'm here to judge Blazing Saddles, which was a damn funny movie.