The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to 1974’s Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks’ adored western comedy starring Gene Wilder and Cleavon Little.
A couple of weeks ago after drunkenly watching an episode of MAFS (seriously, with their strike rate, when are those “experts” going to stop calling themselves “experts”?), The Butcher did a little channel surfing (streamer surfing? Steamer surfing more like it!) and ended up sitting through the doco Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! Holy shit, I really wish I’d passed out instead. Directed by the painfully unfunny Judd Apatow, this doco reminded me of how equally and painfully unfunny writer and director Mel Brooks truly is.
“I’ve always been a huge admirer of my own work,” Mel Brooks once said. “I’m one of the funniest and most entertaining writers that I know.” Probably joking, but more likely totally serious, this New York-born “funny man” – who has most recently cashed in by making past movie hits like The Producers and Young Frankenstein into stage musicals – has somehow managed to maintain a career over a baffling, laugh-free period of fifty-plus years, despite perpetrating a number of unforgivable cinematic crimes.
Mel Brooks created profoundly awful films like Silent Movie, High Anxiety, History Of The World: Part I, Spaceballs (Dark Helmet? Really?), and the aforementioned The Producers and Young Frankenstein. Critics and comedy fans proclaim Brooks a genius, while conveniently forgetting about his decidedly less celebrated films. Anyone remember Life Stinks? What about Robin Hood: Men In Tights, or Dracula: Dead And Loving It? Remember those? Where’s your “comedy genius” now, people? Huh?
Mel Brooks’ worst film, however, is undoubtedly his 1974 “western comedy”, Blazing Saddles, the apparent highlight of which is supposedly a scene in which a group of cowboys let rip around a campfire after indulging in a dinner of gut-starting baked beans. The (back) passage of time is unquestionably at play here; if this scene was dealt (silently or otherwise) in a comedy today, the critics would gas on about how puerile and immature it is.
Just because Blazing Saddles was made in the seventies (can we all get over this apparently untouchable but unbearably overrated decade, please?), and was co-written by that other exalted “comic genius”, Richard Pryor, doesn’t mean that it’s a classic. Yeah, yeah, the sheriff is black (leading to a bunch of cheap N-word jokes), Madeline Kahn does a German accent, a bloke punches a horse, and the film climaxes with a meta-fiction pie fight on a film set. Oooh, clever!
At the time of its, ahem, release, the fart-tastic Blazing Saddles may have been, ahem, trumpeted as a shocking piece of comic provocation, but those who still sing this silly film’s praises are probably the same types who think that their own rear emissions smell like perfume.
Want to read more from The Butcher? Check out his angry missives against Strictly Ballroom, Donnie Darko, Psycho, 12 Years A Slave, Red Dog, The Wolf Of Wall Street, Breathless, Elizabeth, Miracle On 34th Street, The Full Monty, There Will Be Blood, Les Miserables, The King’s Speech, Picnic At Hanging Rock, The Magnificent Seven, Gone With The Wind, The Right Stuff, 81/2, Pulp Fiction, Easy Rider, The Shawshank Redemption, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Wizard Of Oz, Jaws, Black Swan, Gladiator, Chopper, I’m Not There, Interstellar, Marvel Studios and Citizen Kane.
