One of Mel Brooks' funniest films blazes new trail
By Terry Lawson
Knight Ridder News Service
There are good years and there are very good years, and Mel Brooks had a very good 1974.
The two best films of Brooks' career, "Blazing Saddles" and "Young Frankenstein," were released that year, and the first is being celebrated with a new, 30th Anniversary Edition (Warner). It has been given an anamorphic video transfer and a new 5.1 Surround mix, but don't get too excited about the latter: The celebrated campfire symphony is still performed in old-fashioned stereo.
Brooks' western parody teams Cleavon Little as the new, very black sheriff of racist Rock Ridge, with Gene Wilder ("My name is Jim, but people just call me Jim") as the deputized town drunk. Nefarious Harvey Korman has a scheme to run everybody out of town so a railroad can be built. But with the help of various bizarre locals, including an ox-riding Alex Karras and the late Madeline Kahn as a saloon singer, they save the day.
With a nonstop barrage of gags designed to offend every conceivable ethnic group, "Blazing Saddles" is about as tastelessly funny as movies get.
The supplements are pretty good, although Brooks' commentary was almost certainly not recorded while he was watching the movie. Most of his anecdotes are repeated in a fine retrospective documentary called "Back in the Saddle," which gleans insights — and jokes, of course — from Korman, Wilder and Brooks' cowriter Andrew Bergman (though not, alas, from fellow writer Richard Pryor, who was originally intended to play Black Bart and who wrote much of his dialogue).
Brooks never again made a film as funny as "Saddles" or "Young Frankenstein." In 1995, however, he directed and appeared in a "companion piece" to the Frankenstein film called "Dracula: Dead and Loving It" (Warner) with Leslie Nielsen as a clueless bloodsucker.
Recent films
The general consensus seemed to be that the film adaptation of "Cold Mountain" (Miramax) was good, not great, and that the performances by Jude Law as a wounded Confederate soldier who makes an Odyssey-like journey back to his hometown and the woman (Nicole Kidman) he loves but barely knows were very good.
Only the big screen can really do the story justice, but the DVD transfer is crisp and true. There's also an interesting, 70-minute making-of doc that is blessedly free of the usual puffery, and the 20 minutes of cut and shortened scenes are good enough to have been reinserted into the film.
"Barbershop 2: Back in Business" (MGM) was a sequel that did the original justice, and although the plot — an upscale salon chain threatens to put Ice Cube's neighborhood joint out of business — is thin, the mostly good-natured comedy is intact.
