Having not seen “Blazing Saddles” in many years, I had to confirm whether or not it was actually the comedic masterpiece it for so long has been hailed as. Regardless of if the film is actually the sixth funniest movie ever made (according to AFI), it is riotously silly, hilarious, clever, controversial and influential.
Mel Brooks’ movie is the pinnacle example for how to do so many things right. It’s sad that he arguably never got it right again with any of his subsequent films. “The Producers,” “Young Frankenstein” and “Saddles” are his masterstrokes, and while the man still holds some cult acclaim today, every other parody film he made post “Saddles” is somewhat overrated.
And unlike the other two favorites, only “Saddles” is good evidence as to why. It’s tempting to not want to think about a film as silly as this, but like the Marx Brothers before him and “The Simpsons” and “South Park” after him, Brooks practically gets away with murder and it’s worth it to wonder how.
Firstly, “Blazing Saddles” understands the difference between parody and impersonation. The film is a Western, but it doesn’t simply borrow scenes from Hitchcock or “Star Wars” and change a detail. The set pieces in “Blazing Saddles” are very carefully designed, with characters like the cowboys in the opening train track laying scene seeming to crawl right out of something from classic Hollywood. And the hilarious scene inside the Rock Ridge church (a set that for me recalled the one in “High Noon”) has a town drunk giving an incoherent motivation speech that doesn’t seem silly until Brooks calls attention to it.
The whole film is based on the notion that something has to be funny for a reason other than just being a reference. Cleavon Little’s costume seems extravagant and ahead of its time even if you don’t think he’s channeling Alan Ladd in “Shane.”
And this same logic applies to the film’s infamous bean and fart scene. It’s actually shorter than I remember and doesn’t really overstay it’s welcome, but here is a perfect example of why something lewd or smutty is not inherently funny and vice versa. There is no formula that says for certain a fart joke is unintelligent, and this scene is actually quite intelligent in the less-than-subtle way it picks apart a trope of other Hollywood Westerns. And this goes for the film’s liberal usage of the N-word. In both cases’ excess and purpose, the jokes find the right note without going too far.
And yet the rest of the film goes too far on purpose. This is how Brooks pulls off his biggest tricks. In small doses or in large ones, “Blazing Saddles” finds ways to poke fun at death, race, sex, Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan (Have a Nice Day!) and more. A small example that is not really so small at all is when an executioner is hanging a man on a horse and the horse itself. We even hear the horse whinny and collapse as its hung to death, and yet it gets a laugh.
But how? “Blazing Saddles” is such a cartoonish film, even going as far as to cue the “Looney Toons” music when the sheriff brings the telegram to the monstrous Mongo. There is no subtlety or irony here, and there is no way to misinterpret Brooks’ joke. That’s why it works. Brooks does not care how impossible the situation is in this setting. He barrels through each joke at full speed without any exposition to allow it to fit into the film’s narrative, be it the Nazis showing up to join the posse, the Count Basie orchestra scoring the sheriff’s entrance or Brooks as the mayor announcing to Hedley Lamarr that “you can sue her!”
The liberties he takes don’t stop there. “Blazing Saddles” is the first, biggest and best example of how to break the fourth wall in a movie. Sure other directors had made winks to the camera before, like Cary Grant saying in “His Girl Friday” that one character looks precisely like Ralph Bellamy. But Brooks actually finds an extravagant cap to his film by acknowledging that this is no less than a movie built on a sound stage and that even the characters can walk right off set and go see the movie themselves.
There are few films or TV shows even today that can get away with this level of narrative anarchy as Brooks does here. And it’s for all the reasons I’ve mentioned above. “Blazing Saddles” works because Brooks knows in reality it couldn’t possibly. If the purpose of the movies is to allow us to escape reality for just a few hours, “Blazing Saddles” helps by adhering to none of it.