Blazing Saddles
Coming to this film a little younger than perhaps is wise I still fell for Mel Brooks’ classic Western spoof, and there’s a good chance it ruined the genre for me. Seeing Gene Wilder and Cleavon Little poke a sharp stick in the eye of the self-mythologised ‘Hollywood West’ is as funny now as it ever was, and we have Brooks’ writers to thank for that, in particular Richard Pryor whose angry precision is evident throughout.
It isn’t a finely honed film by any stretch of the imagination. It flits from pastiche to outright buffoonery with little concern for a rigid narrative framework, but it is incredibly funny. It is a film as much as movie-making as it is about a take off of the Western genre, as the appearance of the Count Basie Orchestra attests, but in Wilder, Little and the wonderful Madeline Kahn as Lili Von Shtupp it is a riot of quick-draw comedy which kicks the twitching corpse of the Western into a nearby ditch.
Favourite scene: Here’s an example of the genius of Gene Wilder as he and Cleavon Little meet for the first time.
And as a special treat from us, here’s Lili….
