Blazing Saddles

Blazing Saddles highlights every awful, unsavory, unapologetic, and down-right insensitive aspects of human nature towards certain races in the absolute best way in Mel Brook’s 1974 western satire, Blazing Saddles. In modern society, the subject of bad taste is taken more seriously, with most now opting to avoid poking at things or even people that were often demonized and effectively bullied as a societal norm back in the day (a sad but true statement). Of course, there is a balancing act that needs to happen with this as avoiding anything offensive runs the risk of creating a bland comedy, which is a genre which thrives off of misery and/or offending something or someone, but being overly hateful or cruel for the sake of nothing but a joke isn’t and shouldn’t be applauded, so it needs to be handled correctly, and Blazing Saddles was that correct handle. On the American frontier in 1874, a corrupt politician and territorial attorney general Hedley Lamarr (played by Harvey Korman) wishes to destroy a quiet little town called Rock Ridge in order to get proper ownership of their land to build his railroad through it, which would make the land worth millions. To do so, he hires a gang of thugs to assault the town and kill their town’s sheriff, which leads the people to beg for a new one. With everything still going to plan, Hedley appoints Bart (played by Cleavon Little), a black railroad worker, to become Sheriff of Rock Ridge, and he quickly discovers how hard it will be to do this position due to the townspeople’s less than welcoming reception. Only finding friendship in a has-been gunslinger called Jim ‘’the Waco Kid’’ (played by the late Gene Wilder), Bart soon overcomes the townspeople’s hostility and after being threatened by every dangerous human scum of the earth, learns of Hedley’s plan involving the railroad and for his assignment as Sheriff. Now with a mission to follow, Bart along with Jim set out to stop Hedley’s plan, outwit the various killers sent after him which consist of several of the world’s most heinous and racist killers, and prove his capabilities as Rock Ridge’s sheriff. Clearing a product of the time in terms of how it tries to offend every human stereotype on the planet, Blazing Saddles still proves to be a very entertaining humorous film that will make you laugh and winch all the way through.

The set-up is very promising and lends its way to a lot of comedic possibilities. With how widespread and popular the Western genre was within western mainstream cinema, it was prime to be satirized and the film took every advantage it could to not only call out the faults with the genre (the mere fact that a person of color is in a leading role and given a sense of competence is sadly a rarity), but also just mocking the atmosphere that is built around these kind of stories altogether. Mel Brooks knows to make a good satire and had proven it already with his film, The Producers and would later prove it even more with stand-out films like Young Frankenstein and Spaceballs. When satirizing something, it’s important to understand and capture the original spirit of a source material, and everything down to the choice of locations, the vibe of the atmosphere, attitude of the people, sound of the music, tone of the language and even style of cinematography matches perfectly to a typical western. The only true difference is everything is taken to an extreme margin, being very over-the-top silly, drenched in bad taste to a miscellaneous amounts, and is just all around pretty stupid. The film isn’t really plot-based, more just an excuse for jokes. You can feel that not only through the obvious tone and ridiculous nature of the characters and writing, but also from the climax which goes so far off the rails that it borders on entering into its own reality. Considering how much this movie had going against it even back then with Warner Brothers Studio wanting to censor a good chunk of the film for its extreme crude humor and frequent use of a racial slur. While this would usually be a bit much and would never be allowed in today’s society, Mel Brooks was fully supported by both Cleavon Little and Richard Pryor (who acted as a screenwriter for the film) when constructing the movie so it didn’t appear to have any ill will behind its language (at least, not to the point of actively harming anyone outside of basic mockery). It can work as a classic western movie, but always remains in that realm of insane silliness and off-the-wall humor that Mel Brooks is known for.

All the actors are pitch perfect for their roles. Since these characters are very archetypal and don’t require much else besides being funny as well as capturing the essence of the genre they are placed in, a lot of the charm and entertainment comes from how well the actor portray their parts. The two main leads are especially strong with Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder being amazing as their parts and manage to work really well off each other. Little as a smooth-talking bombastic sheriff is a lot of fun and cool to watch with his stage-play acting past bringing that needed extremist acting style which does bring a lot to this kind of film, and him being the first official black main lead in a western is pretty cool. Gene Wilder (who previously and would continue to collaborate with Brooks in the future) excels as the drunk wanting to get his glory back after an embarrassing incident and even brings a level of pathetic sincerity to the role that wasn’t needed but adds a lot in this kind of production. Every side characters aren’t anything remarkable, but they do lend themselves into a satire perfectly because of it, and have fun mocking such characters. All the other actors pride on being their stereotypes and go all the way with it; Harvey Korman as the politician is lovably wicked and whiny and provides a level of snobbish insanity that isn’t afraid to be unsubtle but is acted strongly enough to never be distracting, Madeline Kahn as the seductive German showgirl who can’t sing a tune is appropriately overly dramatic and makes for a good fun small role, Mel Brooks as an overly horny drunk governor is very entertaining , the black characters are likeably stereotyped, and the white men are portrayed as the stupidest, most incompetent, unimaginably thick-headed representation ever portrayed in a western film. It makes the smart decision of mocking everybody because its fair game and it doesn’t feel like a target.

As previously stated, the film gets the visual design of a Western pretty effectively with cinematography by Joseph Biroc and a musical score by John Morris feeling akin to any typical Western of the era, which works in its favour when it comes to making fun of the genre. The film does have a good pace to it, being short and never sticking with a joke for too long before moving on to another scenario. That spontaneous energy is needed in a film like this where its atmosphere of ludicrousness is accentuated when the audience doesn’t have a chance to properly process what they just witnessed. The song numbers which are written by Brooks himself are nice to listen to and fit into a western atmosphere. Like everything else, it takes these established ideas and concepts and flips them to make them more absurd but still slightly functional within the environment like a classic character introduction opening song, a show tune performance number, and an old-fashion background chorus song. Unfortunately, they seem to cut out during the second half, and it feels very awkwardly distributed. The sets themselves do look the part of a western and the production design by Peter Wooley capture the aesthetic well. The stunts, when performed, are impressive and feels authentic. The film doesn’t really have much action, but it makes up for it by defeating expectations and delivering something unexpected and humorous. The humor is classic early satire, being very clever, mainly ranging from absurd to bizarrely dark, but matches it with a whole ton of nonsense and fourth wall breaking nonsense. The writing and a majority of this script written by Brooks along with Andrew Bergman (who wrote the overall story), Norman Steinberg, Alan Uger and Richard Pyror (no doubt assisting in some of the more ”questionable” elements of the script) is very blunt and not afraid of harming anyone’s sensitivities, which makes the humor more shocking and memorable, but could alienate people because of the consistent uncomfortable jokes. The film takes advantage of its humor mocking every terrible aspect of various cultures that nothing feels singled out and rather feels like a funny insult to everyone.

A film like this might never be able to exist nowadays but is still a very good movie. What’s bizarre and also telling is that despite this film being an easy target to call out for offensive material, no one seems to call the film out for being offensive and most just view it as a fun movie. It speaks volumes that with the correct handling, appropriate people leading a project that relates to their voice, and an awareness of how to go and when to pull back, it can make something that would normally go right to the shooting range, actually work out in the short and in the long term. Though the humor won’t be able to click with everyone and the side characters themselves aren’t anything amazing, it still proves to be a charming, funny, and clever satire of classic westerns and cowboy films. More could have been added to give more comedic possibilities and even character, but that’s not the film purpose. The actors are great, the writing is intelligently dumb as well as just intelligent, the sets are cool, the two main leads are incredibly likeable, and it works as a classic western and as a goofy comedy. Many things about this film shouldn’t work, but when you have good writers and a talented satirical director, turning something that should be insensitive and overly harsh into something incredibly funny and purposely degrading to everyone without hurting anyone doesn’t seem too hard. It’s a bad taste movie with a lot of good aftertastes, it’s definitely a wild ride.