The Wilder Wild West

 Dare we dig up a relic and once again confront the consequences of a misspent youth?

BLAZING SADDLES (1974) (B+) - About 20 years ago, I was dating a woman 12 years younger, and I thought it would be fun if I schooled the young woman on the great joy of watching "Young Frankenstein." This was 30 years after its release, and I'll never forget how, after about 10 minutes of Borscht Belt slapstick (the worst part of the movie) that left my date stone-faced, I leaped for the remote to turn it off, embarrassed that I was now on the wrong side of my 40s and out of touch with the person on the couch who born the year the movie came out.

 

So it was with trepidation that I approached the whole idea of screening "Blazing Saddles," the other Mel Brooks-Gene Wilder collaboration, released earlier in 1974. And this one comes with a whole nother hornet's nest of pitfalls -- it has a script riddled with the n-word, and it leaves few vulnerable groups unscathed as it employs Brooks' patented broad vaudevillian humor to skewer the western genre that he and others grew up with. Good lord, should anyone watch this anachronism anymore? 

The screenplay was a five-person effort, which included Richard Pryor, who gave cover to Brooks' regulars to let fly with the racial epithets and who was supposed to star, but for his drug and alcohol battles rendering him unreliable. Enter Cleavon Little, who is a revelation as Black Bart, who lucks out when he's plucked from a lowly railroad job and foisted on the town of Rock Ridge as sheriff. This is the plan of Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman), who needs the town's real estate to reroute his railroad through. The plan is that the sight of a black sheriff will cause all the townsfolk to flee.

Surviving the initial backlash, Bart teams up with the Waco Kid (Gene Wilder) to win over the residents and fend off Lamarr's henchmen, which includes the monstrous moron Mongo (football player Alex Karras), who achieves screen-legend status when the character drops a horse with one punch. Lamarr also sends in a German chanteuse -- the impeccable Madeleine Kahn satirizing Marlene Dietrich -- who succumbs to Black Bart's charms because ... well, you know what they said back then about the brothers. 

This all gets quite silly, of course. And the movie has burnished its notoriety with scenes and one-liners that got passed around my junior high back in the day -- bean-eating cowboys farting around a camp fire; "Where the white women at?"; and, of course, "Excuse me, while I whip this out."

It's been 50 long years since even the idea of a spoof of westerns seemed like something that could work. Jokes about a man constantly being mistaken for Hedy Lamarr ("It's Hedley!") certainly don't age well. The kitchen-sink slapstick can still elicit belly-laughs, but too much now just seems more embarrassing than gut-busting. You can carve out a pretty fun drinking game every time a new vulnerable group gets made fun of. (Even Kahn's character, Lili Von Shtupp, not only has a slut-shaming name as subtle as a poke in the eye, but she comes with a wacky speech impediment.) Back then, you could be an equal-opportunity offender and be rewarded with a hit movie; these days, the few of us who bother to revisit that era will find it more quaint than hilarious. We won't even get into the beta-meta ending, which breaks the fourth wall and offers a spectacle of anarcy, featuring hundreds of extras, that would make Cecil B. Demille blush and which would leave anyone under 40 baffled as to how this would ever be considered amusing.

But, "Blazing Saddles," for better or worst, is a snapshot of a moment in time. In 1974, it had been less than 50 years since Al Jolson performed in blackface. Hollywood of the '40s and '50s was still a fresh memory, and Brooks was the master of satire. Nazis and Klansmen were played for laughs. Effeminate men were a riot. Ethnic putdowns were the coin of the realm. You could argue that the excessive use of the n-word is so over the top that it makes a powerful argument against racism. Who can say anymore? Who cares? Why did I even bring it up? (Counter-argument: the Library of Congress has preserved the movie in the National Film Registry.)

That said, there is much to enjoy about this crazy production. Little is smart and charming. Wilder is an understated gem. Kahn was probably the funniest actress of her generation (she would re-team with Wilder, more famously, in "Young Frankenstein"). I laughed when town leader Howard Johnson (again, that name was funny back when Nixon was president) held up a floral wreath and announced that he wished to "extend a laurel ... and hardy handshake" to the new sheriff. That one will always trigger the 12-year-old in me. Even during this enlightened era we now live in.

REMEMBERING GENE WILDER (C) - This is a rather glum hagiography about the career of Gene Wilder, narrated in his monotone from beyond the grave, presumably from the audio version of his 2005 memoir. He was not only a great comic actor who peaked in the 1970s, but he went on to make his own movies and was also a published author.

But this unimaginative slog through his oeuvre leans heavy on the likes of Mel Brooks -- almost certainly spinning apocryphal, embellished tales of their time together, especially that great run of "The Producers," "Blazing Saddles" and "Young Frankenstein -- and, for some reason, Harry Connick Jr. Other random folks who show up include Alan Alda, Richard Pryor's daughter, and Eric McCormack. Ben Mankiewicz puts on his serious glasses to play cinema historian for the guy who played Willy Wonka.

Wilder was intensely funny. The bar he set in "Young Frankenstein" will always be tough to clear for any actor. But it almost diminishes his contributions to have folks fawn over him as if he were some sort of saint. His relationship with Gilda Radner -- her cancer was diagnosed not long after they fell in love -- gets surprisingly short shrift, with a couple of backhanded digs at the former "SNL" star's troubles. Wilder's widow -- whom he met within a year of Radner's death -- dominates the second half of the film, which takes up Wilder's descent into dementia (in a Hallmark fashion). The man (and poor Gilda) deserves better.