Blazing Saddles (1974)

I'm married to a Millennial and that presents difficulties that are unique to her generation. Especially unique since I am Gen-X and there is that whole rejection of labels thing and her generation is obsessed with labels. And the not understanding satire or dark humor thing that plagues that generation. And, of course, the fact that my generation kind of raised ourselves and hers, well, I have to explain things like why you don't mix coloreds and whites when you do laundry. Anyway, getting her and her besties to sit down and watch anything older than 4 years is an uphill battle... again a uniquely Millennial thing. This is odd to me since I was born after this came out, and, honestly, love a lot of movies even decades older than me.... it's the new ones I don't like. So I begged, and I pleaded, and I finally got them to watch Blazing Saddles, on the basis that I actually forced my wife (at gun point, and knife point) to watch Young Frankenstein and she loved it. Blazing Saddles lasted about 10 minutes before they got upset by the racism. But they she and her best friend and her boyfriend sat it out anyway, and by the end of the movie they were throwing a fit about racism as if I sat them down to watch Birth of a Nation. Mel Brooks somehow went way over their heads... ... I'm not exactly sure that has ever happened before... ever, in all the History of the World, I'm pretty sure that has never, ever, happened before. So I found myself with an angry wife and two very angry friends all pretty much accusing me of being William Luther Pierce. Still not sure what happened there. Something went horribly wrong. This movie kind of mocks racism doesn't it? it turns it into a joke so people can't take it seriously any longer and makes the viewer think that anyone who wears a white robe is an idiot. An absolute moron. And yet their collective reaction kind of assumed the opposite. So, anyway, I slept on the couch for a while as I slowly talked her down and explained that, no, in fact this movie was AGAINST racism. That Mel Brooks is far from a racist. That, in fact, it supports equality. But I'm still very confused. I still don't know how that happened.

I grew up watching the "Friday Western" each week on the television so am a bit steeped in the genre to which this takes an entertaining, and loving, swipe. "Hedley Lamarr" (Harvey Korman) is out to trash his own town so he can buy up the land cheaply for his railroad. What better way to drive folks away than to appoint an African-American sheriff? The shrewd "Bart" (Cleavon Little) knows full well that he has precisely no support from his community - not the sharpest tools in the box - so he signs up the mean "Waco Kid" (Gene Wilder) as his deputy. A gunslinger of ill-repute, he and his boss gradually convince the sheepish townsfolk that they can fight back against the scheming "Lamarr" and maybe even foil his not so cunning plan. My personal favourite scene has to be the wonderful imitation of Marlene Dietrich by Madeline Kahn singing "I'm Tired", but there are loads of other skits of everything from "High Noon" to "Chisum" with Slim Pickens and David Huddleston providing some genuine western credentials to the proceedings. Auteur Mel Brooks pops up once or twice, in differing guises, to add a bit of additional comedy to his already quite daft storyline that is respectful of cowboy movies but also quite potently critical of their stereotyping characters, their repetitive storylines and usually, their entirely predictable conclusions. This mixes all of that up with Little and Wilder gelling well, presenting us with a genuinely laugh out loud, occasionally slap-stick, critique of one hundred years of a theme of cinema that has probably not really evolved that much since 1874!