Cinema Sunday: Blazing Saddles

Today Cinema Sunday takes a look at what is considered one of the funniest movies ever made. 

It also considered one of the most controversial movies ever made. 

Let's time travel back to 1974 for Blazing Saddles.  

The plot (such as it is) is this: In 1874, a new railroad under construction through the American west will have to be rerouted to avoid quicksand.  The new path for the railroad will take it right through the town of Rock Ridge.

Making Rock Ridge worth millions to attorney general Hedley Lamarr if he can get the people who live there to leave town.

Various efforts to scare them out with rampaging thugs ("leaving women stampeded and cattle raped") don't work so Lamarr comes up with a way to make the people of Rock Ridge want to leave.

For their protection, he sends them a new sheriff.

A black sheriff. 

Say hello, Bart. 

"Hello!"  

The good simple folks of Rock Ridge have... issues with having a black sheriff.  Or as one kindly old grandmother puts it, "Up yours, n****r." She will come around and bake him an apple pie.  

With some help from an alcoholic gunslinger known as Jim the Waco Kid, Bart strives to overcome the townspeople's hostility. 

Bart defeats Mongo, an immensely strong, dim-witted thug using an exploding candygram like Bugs Bunny.  (Complete with Looney Tunes music.)  

Lamarr sends German seductress-for-hire Lili Von Shtupp to seduce and destroy the sheriff of Rock Ridge. That plan falls apart when Lili falls hard for Bart. 

From Mongo, Bart & Jim learn Lamarr's interest in Rock Ridge is because of "where choo-choo go". More than this, Mongo knows not for as the man himself says, "Mongo only pawn in great game of life." 

Hedley Lamarr has had enough and puts the call out for an army of the worst scoundrels throughout the west including "Methodists" to launch a final vicious assault to drive the people out of Rock Ridge. 

Bart has a plan. 

He leads the town folks and a gang of railroad workers to build an exact replica of Rock Ridge for the army to attack. The army of criminals is on its way and the plan needs a bit more time for the fake Rock Ridge to be complete.

Bart has a plan for that. 

Enter the toll booth for the Governor William J. Le Petomane Expressway. "Somebody go back and get shit ton of dimes!" 

Out in the wide open plains of the American West with no obstacles on either side of the toll booth, each thug goes through the toll booth one at a time. 

The thug army rides into the fake Rock Ridge and gets mostly taken out by a series of dynamite blasts. The rest of the gang gets into a fist fight brawl with the towns people and railroad workers. 

It's a brawl that bursts out of the fake Rock Ridge into a neighboring movie set filming a Busby Berkeley musical number.  

The fight makes it's way to the studio commissary for a food fight.

The epic battle spills out of the Warner Bros. film lot onto the streets of Burbank. 

At Mann's Chinese Theatre, which is showing the premiere of Blazing Saddles, Bart and Lamarr have a final showdown. 

With the citizens of Rock Ridge safe once more, Bart and Jim leave for "nowhere special" for new adventures.  Outside of town, they get off their horses into a waiting black limousine that drives them towards the western horizon and out of this movie. 

And that my friends is a very surface level look at Blazing Saddles. There's way more than the preceding summary covers. 

Director Mel Brooks pounds hard on the 4th wall through most of the movie until the last act where he basically says "4th wall? We don't need no stinkin' 4th wall!" and obliterates it. 

Anachronisms fly around with reckless abandon. 

• The railroad workers crooning Cole Porter's "I Get a Kick Out of You." 
• Lamarr's henchman declaring "What in The Wide World of Sports is going on here?"  
• The Count Basie Orchestra playing "April in Paris" out on the plains greeting Sheriff Bart as he first rides to Rock Ridge. 
• Addressing his criminal army, Hedley Lamar reminds them that, although they are risking their lives, he is "risking an almost certain Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor!"
• The constant confusion of Hedley Lamarr's name with 20th century film actress Hedy Lamarr. 

Apparently, Hedy didn't think this running joke was really all that funny and sued Warner Bros. for $10 million. The suit was settled out of court for an undisclosed nominal sum and an apology to Lamarr for "almost using her name". Brooks said that Lamarr "never got the joke".  

The film is also rife with all sorts of issues that would be regarded as "politically incorrect" today. The most prominent of these issues is the use of the "N-word".  

Even in the early 1970's, Mel Brooks was sensitive to use of this word.  The people who do use the N-word are usually portrayed as ignorant. 

The old lady who says it to Bart later apologizes for it as a sign of her appreciation for what Bart is doing to help the town. (She still asks Bart not to say anything to the rest of the town about her speaking to him and bringing him a pie.) 

Hedley Lamarr as the big bad of the movie views himself as erudite and sophisticated and never uses the word. Lamarr's chief henchman Taggart is a vile and vulgar man who does use the word to express his anger, fear and stupidity.  There appear to be some guidelines of who does and does not use the N-word. Mel Brooks said he received consistent support from co-writer Richard Pryor and star Cleavon Little. 

Besides there's a lot more to be offended by one is of a mind to be offended by things. 

• Mel Brooks in dark make up as a Native American chief. 
• There are some jokes about rape. 
• Mongo punching a horse.   
• The very, very effeminate portrayal of the very, very obviously gay dancers in the Busby Berkeley musical number.   

So there is a lot to be concerned about from a modern perspective. 

There are also a lot of laughs in this movie. A joke doesn't quite land? Don't worry, another will be along in a minute. 

A lot of the success of Blazing Saddles rests with it's star, Cleavon Little as Sheriff Bart. Little brings a lot of wit and sophistication to his role, deftly moving from comedy to straight man in this madhouse of a movie. 

And Gene Wilder provides perfect support as Jim the Waco Kid, part broken down gun fighter, part serene counselor to Bart's battles to save Rock Ridge despite it's racist residents.  Wilder and Little make a great tag team duo in this movie.  

The "It's That Person Who Was In That Thing" Department

• Slim Pickens (Taggart) was Major T. J. "King" Kong in 1964's Dr. Strangelove.
• Harvey Korman (Hedley Lamarr) was a Mel Brooks regular, appearing in other Brooks films like High Anxiety. His best known work was in the cast of The Carol Burnett Show where Tim Conway kept trying to make Korman break character.  
• Madeline Kahn (Lili Von Shtupp) was another Brooks regular appearing in  Young Frankenstein, High Anxiety & History of the World, Part I. She was also in the movie version of the board game Clue and had a memorable turn in What's Up Doc?. 
• Alex Karras (Mongo) was a former football player who would go on to play the adoptive dad on the ABC sitcom Webster. 
• David Huddleston (Olson Johnson) would go on to star in The Big Lebowski.  
• Liam Dunn (Rev. Johnson) was the judge in What's Up Doc?. 
• John Hillerman (Howard Johnson) would go on to star as Higgins in the original Magnum P.I. series.   

And now...

The "It's That Person Who Was Already In This Movie" Department

Mel Brooks appears in three on-screen roles: 

• Governor Le Petomane
• the Yiddish-speaking Native American chief
• an applicant for Hedley Lamarr's thug army, an aviator wearing sunglasses and a flight jacket. 'Cause a Western has to have an aviator, right? 

He also has two off-screen voice roles:

• one of Lili's German chorus boys during "I'm Tired".
• And as a grouchy moviegoer.   

In 2006, Blazing Saddles was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Roger Ebert described Blazing Saddles as a  "crazed grab bag of a movie that does everything to keep us laughing except hit us over the head with a rubber chicken. Mostly, it succeeds. It's an audience picture; it doesn't have a lot of classy polish and its structure is a total mess. But of course!"  

I can't improve on Ebert's assessment. Yes, there are elements that may not have aged well and offend modern sensibilities but it does deliver on it's mission, to make people laugh.