I tried but I couldn't do it.
I recorded Blazing Saddles on the Tivo this weekend and then sat down on the couch to watch it after I put the little Bowens down to bed last night. AMC bleeped 'nigger', 'shit' and 'asshole' but it was fairly obvious when they were being used. None of that could stop this movie from being horrendously insipid. It's one of those many 'classic' movies that I still have yet to see. (On the burner are 'The French Connection' and 'Serpico')
One part of me wants to take the opportunity to suggest how obvious it must be that the social standing of blackfolks has risen since the time when Blazing Saddles was made. But I even had a hard time managing the mental gymnastics of putting myself in the frame of mind of guessing what might have been or might not have been appropriate for the time. Some jokes, which dragged on forever were just horrid. OK two black guys are sent out to find quicksand in the railroad right of way. Finding them floating in the muck, the white bosses lasso the handcar out of the pit but not the black guys. Ha ha very funny, about 20 seconds worth of funny, not half of the opening.
I'm aware that Richard Pryor was one of the writers of the script, sharing the credit with three others for this Mel Brooks slapstick vehicle. They should have let him write the whole thing. I'm also aware that there was one scene, between Cleavon Little and some hooker in the dark, where the punchline is "That's my arm", but I simply couldn't hold out that long. The Hanging Ogre? Not funny. The scatterbrain Governor? Not funny. The plotting Attorney General? Not funny. Just stupid, stupid, stoopid.
Mel Brooks. What can I say? His taste for the absurd is really very seventies. It just doesn't work now, and I'm hard pressed to say that it ever did for anybody but a PG13 audience. Why is it that I always think of Blazing Saddles in the same breath as the Kentucky Fried Movie? We know that Zucker went on to make Airplane which became the progenitor of today's full-on movie parody movies. What are we up to now? Date Movie? Scary Movie 5? Meet the Spartans?
Brooks seems to me the useful idiot of the movie industry, rather like Cindy Sheehan in politics. We need complete cut-ups like them to prove without a doubt that we do enjoy free speech. Except you just wish they would say something enduring. In the meanwhile, I'll stick with Monty Python.
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