Blazing Saddles

This year, Netflix is curating selections of notable films having an anniversary — 20th, 50th, and so on. One of them is Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles, which turns 50 on February 7. The movie has in recent years been conscripted in the new culture war as an example of comedy that “could never be made today,” because the “wokesters” and oversensitive Zoomers would “cancel” it, or some such thing. Yet there it is, on Netflix, with all thirteen “N-words” intact, along with other slurs. Blazing Saddles couldn’t be made today because it’s very much of its time — a spoof of ‘70s blaxploitation as much as westerns. Other satirical material with bawdy humor and language continues to be made. It’s just that you’re more likely to see it on Max than in the theater.

The movie, written by two Black guys and three Jews, has its heart in the right place when it comes to race. Today, it might come under fire more readily for its gay-bashing humor. Mel Brooks stops the movie cold during its climax so that Dom DeLuise can direct a bunch of flaming nellies in a song-and-dance number while himself playing a gay stereotype. It’s one of several bumps in the narrative’s road, as a Superposse of bad eggs has a traveling brawl with the heroes and townsfolk and keeps bursting in on other productions or the studio commissary, a shambolic meta-ending not unlike the non-climax of Monty Python and the Holy Grail a year later. The thing is, there’s no mitigating satire here, no gay Cleavon Little figure. It’s just making fun of the faygelehs. It’s not great.

Neither is the rest of the movie, really. I adore Mel Brooks as a public figure, your hilarious uncle who’s always “on” and says things in interviews that people quote for decades. May he live to be an actual 2000-year-old man. It’s his movies that don’t do much for me (though I have a soft spot for Young Frankenstein for its obvious love for the old Universal horrors and its dedication to getting the look right). As a writer/director, Brooks tends to elbow us too hard in the ribs trying to sell the laugh. Some of the best moments were improvised, such as the “y’know…morons” line, which benefits from understatement (if Brooks delivered the line he’d have launched it into the cheap seats) and Cleavon Little’s genuine chuckle at it.

Little, of course, plays Bart, the railworker turned sheriff — sent to a town ostensibly to guard it but really to destabilize it. A lot of Blazing Saddles’ racial material, especially as regards white scheming against Black people, wouldn’t offend today so much as seeming somewhat mild. Fifty years ago it was radical; then again, so was the campfire flatulence scene, which now plays both tame and obvious. I can say that Blazing Saddles was absolutely necessary for its time. That doesn’t mean it needs to be driven into oblivion now. To say it hasn’t aged well may only mean society has progressed in fifty years, and I imagine Mel Brooks would be depressed if we hadn’t made any strides since 1974.

Well, in some ways we haven’t. Things go in cycles, and fifty years ago a Black man in drag was on TV (The Flip Wilson Show, still running when Blazing Saddles was in theaters), and today some states are trying to outlaw drag queens. One step forward, ten steps back. The true sin of Blazing Saddles is that its humor is broad (Alex Karras’ Mongo punching the horse — Mongo was reportedly Richard Pryor’s main addition to the script) while its style is bland. The almost serene rapport between Little and Gene Wilder as the broken-down Waco Kid, two hipsters finding each other in a backward-ass town, is a source of pleasure. Harvey Korman, onscreen altogether too much, is not. Madeline Kahn, as the legendary Lili Von Shtupp, is majestically concupiscent while not exactly doing much for the then-fresh second-wave feminism. Blazing Saddles may be instructive in terms of the tropes it chooses to challenge (a group of Black railworkers crooning Cole Porter instead of “Camptown Races”) and the ones it chooses to leave unharmed. 

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