I've had Westerns on the brain lately. It should come as no surprise to anyone who frequents this small, bombastic, foul-mouthed corner of the Interwebs that my favorite Westerns are ones that either fuck with the myths or point, giggle, and make fart noises in the direction of those myths. This is partly because one of the cornerstones in the foundation of my theory that evil white guys in suits are going to kill us all comes from the genocide of the Native Americans: evil white guys in suits did kill them all. But it's also partly because anyone who takes him/herself too seriously is gonna get a stern fucking-with from yours truly, and holy shit do people in Westerns take themselves too seriously. This notion that white people needed to own everything from Massachussetts to California because God willed it, bitch please. God's been fucking slipping for a while now; that whole business about coming down to earth in the person of a hippie reform rabbi and trolling the Italians was ill-considered, and it's all been downhill from there.
Speaking of Italians, until Sergio Leone figured out that throwing meticulous wide-screen compositions, Ennio Morricone scores, Clint Eastwood, and Claudia Cardinale into a picture was a recipe for awesome au jus, I wouldn't have really cared about Westerns apart from humming “Deutschland Uber Alles” whenever John Wayne squinted into the camera. Sergio was the reason I started watching John Ford movies and reluctantly admitting they were the tits. But the movie that got me watching retarded run-of-the-mill Westerns was Blazing Saddles.
Blazing Saddles has been one of my favorite movies for just about my entire life. When I was a kid, I liked all the farting and stuff, but I reached a point where I thought watching a whole bunch of Westerns would help me get a few of the subtler jokes. This pretty much led to me wasting a lot of fucking time watching shitty Westerns, and forming the opinion that Blazing Saddles is the single greatest meta-Western of all time.
At his peak, Mel Brooks had the advantage of perfect timing: he was a seasoned comedy-writing veteran, who had the benefit of beginning his career as a movie director at a time when all the old restrictions were disappearing. He also had an impressive knowledge of the history of cinema, and a deft feel for not only written language but cinematic language as well (in this regard, his one equal as a director of movie comedies is Woody Allen).
Before he—ironically, given the inspiration of this post—started taking himself too seriously and making self-indulgent mistakes like casting himself as the lead in High Anxiety, thinking anyone would give a shit about Silent Movie, and getting himself confused with Ernst Lubitsch with the remake of To Be Or Not To Be, Mel Brooks directed three of the finest screen comedies ever: The Producers (the one with Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel, not the awkwardly filmed one with Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane), Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein (which will the subject of its own post sometime).
The Producers certainly Goes There in terms of content (though diluted a bit now, I remember very fondly seeing “Springtime For Hitler” for the first time and going, “Wow, Mel Brooks has fucking balls”) and Young Frankenstein has about a hundred of the funniest one-liners and sight gags ever, but Blazing Saddles is fucking insane. Blazing Saddles is what happens when you take your friend with Asperger's, give him a five-strip of industrial-strength acid, and put him in a Western double-feature with a theater full of Borscht Belt comedians.
Blazing Saddles opens with the evil white guys' field grunts bossing around a bunch of railroad workers (“The way you was lolly-gaggin ya'd think it was a hundred and twenty degrees . . . cain't be much more than a hundred and fourteen! HAHAHAHA!”) before suggesting to the black railroad workers that they could lift morale if they sang a “good ol' nigger work song.”
This is a reminder, if one is required, that this movie was made in 1974, before political correctness. Even by 1974, though, it was a rare picture that came right out and saturation n-bombed as much as Blazing Saddles does, let alone as hilariously.
Anyway, the black railroad workers turn to each other, murmuring “a nigger work song . . .?” before Cleavon Little steps to the front and, hat over heart (and barely keeping a straight face) starts singing “I Get a Kick Out of You” by Cole Porter. The bosses' dudes get pissed, and start teaching the railroad workers a “real” song (“Camptown Races”) before Slim Pickens shows up and empties a couple warning shots of awesome—“What in the wide wide world o' sports is a-goin' on here? I hired you people to try to get a little track laid, not jump around like a bunch of Kansas City faggots!”—before instructing his dudes to check reports that there's some quicksand up ahead of where they're trying to put the railroad, and to not waste horses but rather “send over a coupla niggers.” Cleavon Little and his buddy are selected as the requested advance team, and sure enough there's a big thing of quicksand ahead. Slim Pickens reluctantly saves Cleavon Little and his associate, but not before rescuing the expensive piece of equipment they rode in on. Cleavon Little, not one to take such insults lightly, smacks Slim Pickens over the head with a shovel.
It is thus that villain (Evil? Check. White guy? Check. Suit? Check) Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman) decides that the railroad is going to have to go through idyllic Western everytown Rock Ridge, where everyone's name is Johnson, and where Dmitri Tiomkinesque High Noon-ass music emanates from the very air. The awesome thing about Hedley Lamarr (aside from his name) is that he's too much of a pussy to just declare eminent domain and gank the town. He hatches a scheme, so nefarious, so deliciously wicked, so sensuously evil that he is clearly a movie villain (the real-life evil white guys just said “fuck you” and eminent domained that shit): he will convince the people of Rock Ridge to voluntarily vacate the land so he can buy it cheap. That's not the best part, though. The way he's gonna do this is by appointing Cleavon Little as sheriff.
Cleavon Little, happy to not be hung by the neck until dead for banjaxing Slim Pickens, approaches his new job in style—Gucci saddlebags, Count Basie himself appearing in a cameo to conduct his theme music—only to find that the meek, mild-mannered white townfolk don't like African Americans. OH NOES! He rides into town, in total silence. The fanfare the town had prepared for their new sheriff, abandoned as they gape at Cleavon Little in shock. As he delivers his prepared speech (“Excuse me while I whip this out.” [women scream in terror; he produces a sheet of paper, everyone sighs, kinda disappointed]) they recover and start pointing guns at him, leaving Cleavon Little to improvise some vaudeville minstrel act to distract everyone.
An ally soon presents himself in the form of Gene Wilder (Mel Brooks deserves to be hailed as a god for his selection of a black guy and a Jew as the heroes of his Western, if nothing else; bravo, sir, bra-fucking-vo!), a drunk tank inmate. He turns out to be legendary gunslinger The Waco Kid, and “must have killed more men than Cecil B. DeMille.” (Ed. Note: Cecil B. DeMille is still regarded by purists as the real record holder, as Roland Emmerich's modern-day record was revealed to have been aided by performance enhancing drugs) The Waco Kid turned to drink after being challenged to a gunfight by a little kid. Realizing the folly of his ways, he laid his guns down and walked away. But . . . “Little bastard shot me in the ass!” And from there it was drink.
Cleavon Little tells Gene Wilder about how he came to be out West in a story that manages to make an incredibly profound statement about the history of the American West in the form of a Jewish joke: as his family's wagon train was set upon by Indians, they were spared by Yiddish-speaking Indian chief Mel Brooks (“Shvartzes! Tsayt ist meshuggeh . . .”) who bids them safe passage. Sure it's a funny joke, but like George Bernard Shaw said, when a thing is funny, look for the truth. The Indians kind of were the Jews of North America. The genius here, though, is that rather than getting all somber about it, Mel Brooks goes, “fuck it, what happened to us both was so awful, let's have a laugh.” And that makes the point even better.
After bonding over their pasts, Cleavon Little cleans Gene Wilder up and appoints him to the role of deputy (historical accuracy note: blurry line between law enforcement and criminal in Old West) and soon the two are smoking joints that make Gene Wilder's voice helium squeaky, in what may very well be the best throwaway weed smoking joke in the history of cinema.
Cleavon Little manages to escape being killed by the townspeople, although they still call him the n-word. This leaves Hedley Lamarr to come up with a new, even more nefarious plan: foil Cleavon Little with a white chick. Not just any white chick . . . a German white chick. Madeleine Kahn, as cabaret star Lilli von Shtup.
Yeah, sure that combination of actor and character is fuckup-proof, but holy living shit Madeleine Kahn is hilarious with her Elmer Fudd-in-drag-doing-Dietrich accent. Hedley Lamarr preps her to make sure she's ready to seduce and destroy Cleavon Little, and even though Gene Wilder warns Cleavon Little it could be a trap, he goes backstage into the spider's web anyway. And fucks her brains out. And the next morning, has her wrapped around his finger, helplessly enthralled with his forbidden, exotic sexuality.
At wit's end, Hedley Lamarr demands that Slim Pickens think of something. (This in itself is an indicator of how dire the situation must have been for Hedley . . . asking Slim Pickens to think?) After a round of bean-induced farting—the Odessa steps sequence of fart humor—Slim Pickens' retard right-hand man, the one who tried to teach Cleavon Little how to sing Camptown Races in the beginning, comes up with the idea of sending in monosyllabic strongman Mongo (former football player and future Webster dad Alex Karras). Slim Pickens is in awe of the cruelty of this notion, and sends in Mongo.
Mongo rides into town, scares the fucking shit out of everybody (“Mongo! Santa Maria!”) and, in one of the greatest “Oh shit that is just wrong and I should not be laughing hahahahahahahahahahaha” moments in cinema, knocks a horse unconscious with one punch just because. Cleavon Little has to think quickly, and again resorts to a vaudeville minstrel bit (Mel Brooks knows how to hoist fucked-up traditions on their own petard like nobody's business), blowing Mongo up with a candygram bomb (“The bitch was inventin' the candygram . . . I probably won't even get credit for it . . .”)
Surprisingly, Cleavon Little getting the better of Mongo makes Mongo a fiercely devoted ally, and Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder are able to get some broad strokes of Hedley Lamarr's plan out of Mongo, though details are in short supply, because “Mongo only pawn in game of life.” (historical accuracy note: evil white guys in suits employing and willing to sacrifice physically gifted proletarians to carry out their dastardly will)
After a bit of intelligence gathering by the sheriff's department, it transpires that Hedley Lamarr is raising an army of “rustlers, cutthroats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperadoes, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, half-wits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswagglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass kickers, shit kickers, and Methodists” to tear Rock Ridge a new asshole. The townspeople have by now reluctantly accepted Cleavon Little as a guy who gets things done, but when he comes up with a plan to construct a copy of Rock Ridge to mislead the bad guys—and once all the bad guys are in the fake town, blowing them to hell with dynamite—there's a bit of resistance. Because, part of the plan is that Cleavon Little wants to bring all his old buddies from the railroad to help with the construction. Cleavon Little insists “You'd do it for Randolph Scott.” This point is, of course, uncontestable. Eventually, Olsen Johnson (David “The Big Lebowski” Huddleston) offers a compromise with one of my favorite lines of all time:
“We'll give some land to the niggers and the chinks . . . but we don't want the Irish!”Cleavon Little refuses to budge, and Huddleston smiles and says “Fuck it, they can stay!” So, having racially harmonized, everyone bands together as one to hornswoggle the baddies. The plan goes pretty well—one anachronistic gag involving a toll booth leads to Slim Pickens' classic “Somebody's gonna have to go back and get a shitload of dimes!”—until the bad guys figure out that the fake Rock Ridge is fake. At this point all hell breaks loose, and a massive fight ensues.
So massive, in fact, that it breaks the fourth wall. This is why Blazing Saddles is holy to me. Mel Brooks takes the trope of the big showdown at the end of the Western and takes it to the most duckfuckingly insane extreme ever. The scruffy Western brawlers accidentally crash through a flimsy wall into the set of a musical being directed by a fabulous (and fabulous) Dom DeLuise. When he gets all up in Slim Pickens' grill about what the fuck he's doing on a closed set, Slim Pickens puts the little poof in his place—“Piss on you, I'm workin' for Mel Brooks!”—and then puts his lights out. The all-male cast is not pleased:
“He hit Buddy! Get him, girls!”And the fight just gets bigger. It spills into the commissary, right after an actor made up in Hitler says “They lose me right afta the bunka scene” in Noo Yawk-ese. Eventually, Hedley Lamarr runs across the street from the Warner Bros lot and hails a cab, instructing it to “get me off this picture.”
The ultimate showdown between Cleavon Little and Hedley Lamarr takes place at the premiere of Blazing Saddles at Grauman's Chinese (of course), and Cleavon Little shoots Hedley Lamarr in the balls, leaving him time to make one more joke about Hedy Lamarr before expiring.
Back in Rock Ridge (the transition makes perfect sense, somehow), the townspeople are begging Cleavon Little to stay, but he, like all good Western heroes, has to ride off into the sunset. He asks Gene Wilder if he'll ride off into the sunset with him. And so they do. Out to where their limo is waiting for them, and they get off their horses, into the limo, and ride off.
Critics, at the time of Blazing Saddles' release, sniffed that it was vulgar, structurally scattershot, messy, and generally proved themselves to be sticks in the mud. The movie is, indisputably, out of its motherfucking mind, and did inspire a lot of vulgar comedies that weren't as smart or as good, but Blazing Saddles is an unqualified masterpiece, and an essay on the Western every bit as brilliant as Godard's on the gangster picture in Breathless, and Blazing Saddles has a lot more dick and fart jokes than Breathless. That's another thing. For fuck's sake Blazing Saddles invented the fart joke. The best part about fart jokes is that they make uptight film faggots make the “who farted?” face, and you, as a less uptight film faggot, can point out the irony that a fart joke produces, in them, the same result as a fart. And then you can laugh, because farting is funny.
It is a little sad that Mel Brooks later fell off the rails, but before he did he made Young Frankenstein, which holy fucking shit is Young Frankenstein fucking funny. More on that at a later date, but it, Blazing Saddles, and The Producers make up for all the misfires that followed. And then there's Spaceballs, and Spaceballs is special. So that's four of the funniest pictures ever made, and some really funny shit in some of the less perfect ones. Mel Brooks did okay for himself, but Blazing Saddles is the apex. Never before have balls, intellect, a mastery of cinema history and technique, and The Funny met, given each other the finger, rode around on horses, told each other Jewish jokes, and faded into the night quite like they did there.
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