Overall Rating
  Awesome: 84.38%
Worth A Look: 6.25%
Average: 2.08%
Pretty Bad: 1.04%
Total Crap: 6.25%
1 review, 90 user ratings
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| Blazing Saddles |
by PyThomas
"One of Mel's durn tootin' finest."
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Excuse me while I whip this out...If only Mel Brooks could make a fiercely funny satire like Blazing Saddles again. After his late-seventies peak, the poor guy seems to be slumming these days, what with how Life Stinks, Robin Hood: Men In Tights and Dracula: Dead and Loving It all turned out to be box-office schmucks. And creativity-wise, only Men In Tights held up to Grandmaster Melle Mel's earlier work, and even that may be because it was basically "When Things Were Rotten: The Movie."
But I digress. Blazing Saddles is indeed a comic gem, made in 1974 when Mel's brand of comedy was still in vogue. Cleavon Little plays Bart, a black railroad worker in 1874 whose act of rebellion against his abusive boss dooms him to the hangman's noose, when all of a sudden a golden opportunity drops into his lap... to become sheriff of the small Colorado town of Rock Ridge.
That golden opportunity comes courtesy of Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman), a shady, conniving member of Governor LePetomane's administration (Le Petomane, French for "fart master", played by Mel himself). As the railroad is planned to cut through Rock Ridge, Hedley wants the land to himself, so he schemes with a rogue gang of bandits to terrorize the Rock Ridgers, so that they'll abandon their town and leave all that valuable land to himself. When the townsfolk petition their governor for a new sheriff, the job of appointing one falls to Hedley, who fumes, "But law and order is the LAST thing I need right now!"
So he builds a new scheme: Appoint a sheriff that will offend and divide the people and strike at them while they're weakened as a community. Thus Bart dons the tin star and reports for duty - much to the chagrin of the lily-white citizens of Rock Ridge. The goings are rough at first, but the new African-American sheriff slowly wins their trust and admiration with the help of veteran gunslinger the Waco Kid (Gene Wilder).
Hedley, seeing his brilliant plan backfire, tries other ways to bring down the sheriff and the town, one way by getting German burlesque performer Lily von Shtupp (Madeline Kahn) to seduce Bart. As the standoff reaches its climax, the film's action spills out of the movie itself and into various parts of the Warner Bros. Studios.
The humor is broad, scatological, and evenly distributed in terms of racial jokes. The N-word is used quite frequently here, but that is offset by the relatively dignified treatment that Mel gives the African-Americans. Besides, Mel is an equal opportunity jokester - Orientals, Irish, white supremacists and of course Jews are all targets for his parodying. And in Blazing Saddles the laughs are kept at a steady pace. This film will endure for ages to come as one of Mel's signature works.All together now... "Hold out your hands, stick out your tush, hands on your hips, give them a push..."
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=1866&reviewer=9
originally posted: 03/19/99 07:12:44
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USA
07-Feb-1974 (R)
DVD: 29-Jun-2004
UK
N/A
Australia
N/A
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