It’s Good To Be The King

Since 1968, Mel Brooks has directed eleven movies. Of those, seven varied between “very funny” and “not so funny,” and one was just plain awful. But three of them rank unquestionably among the greatest comedies ever—indeed, among the Great Movies. It’s hard to fathom how a person can leave an irreversible mark on the popular lexicon in a scant 270 minutes, but that’s just what Brooks did between 1968 and 1974. The world will never forget Mel Brooks, and most of it will probably never forgive him, either.

Starting a his showbiz career as a standup comic and writer in the 50s, Mel Brooks was brought up in the tradition of Catskills comedy. Born Melvin Kaminsky, Brooks embraced his Jewish roots early on, going so far as to say he was more proud of his “Jewishness” than anything else. As such, he would employ that persona throughout his career, including his blatantly stereotypical character he did with Carl Reiner, the 2000-Year-Old Man. After working in television with Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows and Buck Henry on the cult classic Get Smart, Brooks took his first directorial stab at the movies with The Producers in 1968.

Keeping to his roots, he tells the story of sheisty, down-on-his-luck producer Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel), who used to be the self-proclaimed “King of Broadway.” Acting on the afterthought advice of his nervous, nebbish accountant Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder in his first starring role), Bialystock decides to execute the biggest scam the Great White Way ever saw with an elaborate fraud scheme (which they more amicably refer to as “creative accounting”). The idea is brilliantly simple: raise a million bucks to produce a sixty thousand dollar turkey and pocket the rest. The show is none other than Springtime for Hitler, a lavish musical written by crackpot ex-Nazi Franz Liebkind (Kenneth Mars) featuring shameless Hitler-glorification and chorus platoons of stormtrooping showgirls in S.S. uniforms, high kicking and goosestepping and sieg heiling their way across Berchtesgaden in what looks like the bastard child of Leni Riefenstahl and Busby Berkeley. Much to their chagrin, however, the outlandish spectacle becomes a hit when it’s mistaken as a comedy—an ironic kick in the teeth that reaffirms Bialystock as the biggest name on Broadway but also lands him in jail. Just as Springtime for Hitler is a love letter to history’s most infamous dictator, The Producers is a love letter to show business. And although we’re never actually told, it’s quite obvious that Bialystock and Bloom are Jews…producing a show about Nazis. On the surface level it seems quite offensive, but in execution it’s flawless—Brooks manages to lampoon fascism and showbiz stereotypes at the same time, and the result is a must-see film for any movie fan.

Mel took another swipe at racism with his next great movie, Blazing Saddles. Set in the American west in 1874, it’s the (semi) epic tale of a black railroad worker (Cleavon Little) appointed sheriff of an imperiled but stubbornly racist town. Employing the help of a boozed-out ex-sharpshooter (Wilder again), the new sheriff saves the town from the evil state procurer Hedy (Hedley!) Lamarr and wins the affections of the townsfolk (he even gets them to like the Irish, too!) Outrageous even by today’s standards, Blazing Saddles pulls no punches with racial epitaphs—most notoriously the dreaded “n” word. Its depiction of bigots as bunch of blithering idiots does more to dispel prejudice than the colorful vocabulary (no pun intended) does to perpetuate it, and the result is one of the more effective manifestos in the post civil rights movement world. But its love affair with showbiz of old—a slew of puns and a few Looney Tunes references (and let’s be honest—Bugs Bunny was a vaudeville comic himself)—is perhaps more important to its cinematic significance. Furthermore, Blazing Saddles made Mel Brooks the unrivalled king of parody.

Brooks’ brand of parody/homage perhaps reached its apex with his next film, a tribute to Universal monster flicks of the 30s called Young Frankenstein. Lovingly scripted by Wilder, Young Frankenstein was the absolute zenith of parody and reverence, combing lighthearted fun-poking with deep adoration of old-world Hollywood. Stubbornly refusing to make the movie unless he was allowed to shoot it in black and white, Brooks showcased a painstaking attention to detail to create the exact aura of an old horror movie, even using the original set pieces from James Whale’s 1931 classic. Indeed, the final project is a thing of spectacular beauty in its own right, all jokes aside. Brooks’ love of cinema has never been more evident than in the gorgeous black and white cinematography and art direction, and evokes a similar feeling in a viewer who loves the movies as much as he does. But it’s certainly not all gloss and glitz—indeed, Young Frankenstein was probably the most comically sophisticated movie in the Brooks canon as well, but that’s largely due to Wilder’s incredibly smart script. Consider one of the film’s most famous scenes, a song and dance number referencing Fred Astaire’s Blue Skies in which the good doctor and the monster perform a coat-and-tails rendition of “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” which Brooks initially thought was too kitschy for the film’s overall tone. However, it can’t be denied that Brooks’ unique comic flair was embedded throughout the project, and he never did a more admirable job when it came to direction.

For the rest of his film career, Mel fluctuated between genius and banality, but much of it is certainly quite funny. The aptly-titled Silent Movie was a stroke of inspiration—chronicling a harebrained director (played by Brooks) and his quest to revive the heyday of silent comedy, it featured some wonderful scenes and fabulous appearances from otherwise respectable actors, such as Paul Newman and Brooks’ wife Anne Bancroft. High Anxiety, a tribute to the suspense films of Alfred Hitchcock (and dedicated to the master), contains one of the best ensemble casts he ever amassed and some fine jokes as well. The historical epics of Cecil B. DeMille were the subject of parody in History of the World, Part I, which saw Brooks reach the height of his ever-escalating vulgarity, but for the most part it doesn’t overshadow comic substance. Albeit a tad unbalanced, History of the World contained some gems, including a little known facts about Moses (also Brooks) and the events of the Last Supper, as well as a lovely song and dance routine led by Tomás de Torquemada (Brooks again) in the midst of the Spanish Inquisition. But by the time of Spaceballs, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, and the absolutely dreadful Dracula: Dead and Loving It, it was clear that Brooks was past his prime. Although those films contained some very funny material (well, not Dracula), they were wildly unbalanced and lacked the inspired flair of the older ones. But after giving the world three of the funniest movies ever made (and giving Broadway one of its funniest shows), we can forgive the later blunders. Actually, with such a relatively small body of work, its amazing how much impact Mel Brooks has had on American culture. So as far as I’m concerned, hail to the king.