Cinema Flashback - Blazing Saddles, 1974

It’s safe to say that 1974 was a pretty good year for Mel Brooks. Although he’d made a name for himself having directed and won a screenwriting Oscar for The Producers and for creating the TV series Get Smart, he was by no means a well-known filmmaker to the general population.

How great would it be to go back in time and see the opening weekend of the film that changed all of that?

Brooks’ one-two comedy punch of Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein would cement his status as a legendary comedy writer/director/producer/actor in a way that hadn’t quite been seen before. It’s hard to guess when movie audiences, having sat down to watch Blazing Saddles, first realized that they were seeing something special - did the opening theme, sung by Mule Train crooner Frankie Laine, come across as genuine or parody? Did the movie’s first scenes, shot on dusty prairies, fool audiences into thinking they were watching a “real” western?

Or, perhaps, did people sit up and take notice upon hearing this early line of dialogue, spoken by Burton Gilliam, in which he suggests to the black members of a railroad crew:

“Now, come on, boys! Where’s your spirit? I don’t hear no singin’! When you were slaves, you sang like birds. Go on. How ’bout a good ol’ nigger work song?”

And from their response, and the subsequent ridicule of Gilliam’s character, it just gets better and better.

Brooks pulls no punches in this movie, spares no stereotype and leaves few movie clichés untouched by his hilariously lowbrow satirical skewering. And as lowbrow as it obviously is, BS still manages to create a very sophisticated, cockeyed look at western films, of heroes and villains and of the often silly and pointless conventions of moviemaking. In retrospect, it’s an impressive, ambitious effort for a writer/director’s third movie to hit it this far out of the park, and not everyone at the time realized it. Check out Roger Ebert’s original review, in which he takes only a rather thin, cursory look at BS:

“Mostly, it succeeds. It’s an audience picture; it doesn’t have a lot of classy polish and its structure is a total mess.”

I haven’t seen anything written by Ebert on BS since this original review, so I’m not sure if he ever revisited the film and considered how much he missed the point.

Because not only was Blazing Saddles a blockbuster-sized success, but it has an amazingly enduring quality to it that the finest comedies should have. It may include a handful of dated jokes, but in general it has stood up well in repeated viewings for more than 30 years. What’s more, in the foolishly PC world we’re now living in, BS still comes across as controversial! Watch the virtually unwatchable TV version to see what I mean, in which jokes as harmless as the cowboys-eating-beans scene is censored beyond all reason, the funny mercilessly stripped out of it. Or consider this news story from May of this year in which a teacher was compelled to apologize for showing BS to a class of high school students - not because the film had no educational value (which could be debated, I’d suggest), but because it was “a racist film”!

Talk about missing the point.

Before I let you go, here are a few assignments:

• Go read this 30th anniversary BS DVD review. Great insight and commentary.
• Take a look at the original Blazing Saddles trailer, a rather unfocused hodge-podge of jokes - most of them cut short before their punchlines - that doesn’t sell the movie very well at all.
• Tell me your Cinema Flashback in the comments below: what groundbreaking, historically important movie would you travel back through time to see on its opening weekend?

Thanks for reading. Go see more movies in the theater!