"She just goes a little mad sometimes. We all go a little mad sometimes."

Happy 50th birthday, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.

BBC News has an article, "How Psycho changed cinema," that's a good reminder of why this is a pretty big deal.

San Francisco Silent Film Festival's 15th anniversary — July 15–18

Speaking of Louise Brooks (and we were), the San Francisco Silent Film Festival has announced this summer's movie line-up and look who's on the brochure.

Says the press release:

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the largest and most important festival of its kind in North America, will celebrate its 15th Anniversary Festival at the majestic silent-era movie palace the Castro Theatre this July.

This year's program is an extraordinary collection of favorites and a few that would be new to me. Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (my own write-up is here) must be a real trip when shared by a big audience of enthusiasts, and oh how I'd love to see that newly restored version of Metropolis.

Yet another reason to visit one of my favorite cities.

Where are the West Seattle Grouchos?

Ah, springtime, when the Grouchos bloom. Or at least they did for three springs prior to this one.

For three consecutive Aprils, 2007-2009, a curious sight popped up on my daily drive to and from my home. Soon after you'd hit the eastbound lane of the West Seattle Bridge connecting our neighborhood peninsula to mainland Seattle and downtown, and if you slowed down just enough to take a look into the woodsy area south of the bridge, there amidst the trees and the brush, you could spy — like a National Geographic photographer on a field assignment in wildest Freedonia — a guerrilla public art grouping of cutouts depicting Groucho Marx, each in full crouch as if foraging for wealthy widows among the greenery. (The spot is geo-marked at Wikimapia and wiki.worldflicks.)

They'd last about a month, then were gone as stealthily as they came. Who put them up every spring, and why, remains a mystery to us locals. But we loved them. Seattle generally has an out-there, quirk-heavy sense of humor, and it was gratifying to see that somebody in my own 'hood had a flair for the drive-by non sequitur — and possessed, evidently, a taste in movies similar to my own.

Fom matthetube's photostream on Flickr. Thanks, Matt.

What's the word for a herd of Northwest Forest Grouchos? (Latin: rufusis t. fireflyus.) Perhaps they're hunting for cocoanuts, animal crackers, horse feathers, duck soup, or just some monkey business. If you listen closely you might hear their mating coo: "Helloooo, I must be going...."

I remember one Friday after a particularly frustrating day at work. While driving home gnashing my teeth (seriously, there were sparks), seeing my friendly neighborhood Grouchos was just what I needed to start scraping the day off my skin. It's like that scene in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters: Allen's character — suffering life's slings and arrows to the point of despondency and suicidal musings — takes refuge in a movie theater. It's a revival house showing Duck Soup, the Marx Brothers' wildly funny comedy from 1933. Sitting there in the dark, with the Brothers' masterpiece flickering before him, Allen receives an epiphany: Is existence really so awful as long as it has the Marx Brothers in it?

Five minutes later I was home. Without stopping to check the mail or listen to any phone messages, I poured a glass of good-enough wine, kicked off my shoes, and headed straight to the Movie Room. There I turned on the big screen and went to my DVD shelves. From the shelf span holding movies from the 1930s, I pulled out a fat boxed set, The Marx Brothers: Silver Screen Collection. I slid Animal Crackers into the player, slumped like a bag of sand on the couch with my wine, and hit the play button.

Within moments the whole day's crappitude was brushed away by Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and sometimes Zeppo. Okay, sure, the wine helped. Nonetheless, by the time Groucho had gotten to "One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas — how he got in my pajamas, I don't know," I was feeling good with a smile on my face. When he quips the line that, to me, is the funniest dirty joke in cinema history — "Signore Ravelli's first musical selection will be Somewhere My Love Lies Sleeping with a male chorus" — all was right with my world.

But not this year. It's well into June now and the Grouchos haven't returned. Damn. Did the guerrilla artiste move on? Did he or she or they tire of that hillside climb through jungle foliage? Did the figures decide that they didn't want to be part of any underbrush that would have them as members?

Looks like I'll just have to watch the movies without them. I'm sure I'll manage. Miss those guys, though.

The first 15 were so good, let's go for another

Tomorrow, Elizabeth and I will enjoy our 15th anniversary. Thought I'd show you what I got her.

First, a little context:


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Now:

Now, unless you know me personally, the ♥ may need further context. You can find that via this blog's first entry from March 17, "Rebooting." From there you'll find links to LiveJournal posts from me and Elizabeth regarding the should-have-been uncomplicated heart surgery that nearly killed me several times over, placed me in a weeks-long coma, pushed me into months of recovery from complete muscle atrophy, and, well, rebooted my life after an unexpected systems crash.

It's a story that ended only today, in fact. This morning I returned from the hospital with a coronary stent, a "fix of the fix" that should put right what went horribly wrong last July 10 (which was — can you believe it? — my birthday).

I'm pleased to report that our anniversary tomorrow, and my next birthday one month later, are expected to offer up only pleasant surprises. (And hey, I'm working on a short film screenplay inspired by the freaky hallucinatory dreams I had under coma sedation.)

It's good to be alive, isn't it?

Music: Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong, Ella & Louis Again
Near at hand: A glass of pretty good pinot grigio.

Lost Charlie Chaplin film discovered in Michigan antique sale

Film historian and biographer Scott Eyman, writing in the Palm Beach Post, reports that a lost early short — with an appearance by Charlie Chaplin in a Keystone Kops iteration of his budding Little Tramp guise — has been found in one of those unlikely places where Lost Arks have a tendency to turn up:

The 16mm print was found by historian and collector Paul Gierucki at an antiques show in Michigan. Thinking it was just another old Keystone comedy, he didn't look at it for a while. He finally got around to it in early March and quickly realized what he had.

Released by Mutual Film Corporation in February 1914, the 10-minute one-reeler titled A Thief Catcher has long been considered lost forever, along with a sickeningly high percentage (roughly 50% to 80% depending on who you ask) of films from the pre-sound era. It's one of about 35 films that Chaplin, then only 24, appeared in throughout 1914, during his apprenticeship with Mack Sennett and Sennett's Keystone company of players.

As the Palm Beach Post article states, Chaplin was still mostly unknown at this point and isn't the star of the film, which features Keystone Kops comedy stars Ford Sterling, Mack Swain, and Edgar Kennedy (all welcome finds as well). Chaplin's extended cameo totals two to three minutes of footage, but it is unmistakably him.

Filmed the preceding January (about a month after Chaplin first arrived at the Keystone studio in Edendale, California), A Thief Catcher premiered in 1914 on February 19. His first movie, Making a Living, had been released just two weeks earlier on February 2. In between those two, movie-goers witnessed one of the most auspicious debuts in cinema history: the February 7 release of Kid Auto Races at Venice, the Keystone short that marked the first public screen appearance of Chaplin's now-iconic Little Tramp character.

While A Thief Catcher offers us Chaplin still discovering his creative voice, by the end of 1914 his films for Mack Sennett and Keystone had made him an international star. With rising popularity came his demands for an equally rising salary and creative control, demands met by a new studio, Essanay, and he started the next phase of his career there in January 1915. Chaplin's ascendancy as the world's most famous movie-maker had already begun.

Unlike too many news squibs about specialized topics (ask me to grouse about science reporting sometime), Scott Eyman's is written by someone who knows the subject and uses his sources well, providing context and meaning as well as bullet-point factoids.

"It's either his second moustache picture or his first," says [film collector] Richard Roberts. "It cements the concept that he had the character before he came to Keystone and didn't slap it together on the way to the shooting stage one day. Even when he's doing a minor part he's doing that character. It's a new brick in the Chaplin biography. And this opens up the door to other unknown Chaplin appearances at Keystone."

I dug around my own library for further info. Glenn Mitchell, in his The Chaplin Encyclopedia, has a substantial section on Chaplin's Keystone period. In it Mitchell notes a list of Chaplin's Keystone films printed in Sight & Sound in 1938 and compiled by H.D. Waley, then Technical Director of the British Film Institute. Waley's list included, says Mitchell, "an erroneous title deleted from subsequent lists, Ford Sterling's A Thief Catcher."

In David Robinson's definitive biography, Chaplin, we find that more than 50 years after Chaplin's stint with Keystone...

"... Chaplin told an interviewer that he had actually played bit roles as a Kop in Keystone films, though so far none of these appearances has been identified."

Looks as though A Thief Catcher changes that. Here's hoping others soon come to light as well.

What I wouldn't give to be in Rosslyn, Va. on July 17 to attend Slapstickon for A Thief Catcher's return to a flickering screen and smiling audiences.

I dream of working on a production of "Hamlet" that uses this sign as its poster's central image

Music: The Beatles, Rubber Soul (2009 remaster)
Near at hand: Untidy stack of spiral-bound paper with writing notes.

Alternate universe movies: "The Public Enemy" with Louise Brooks instead of Jean Harlow

I do love a good Cagney movie. White Heat, Angels with Dirty Faces, Yankee Doodle Dandy....

Like Bogart or Ingrid Bergman or Cary Grant, James Cagney is one of those vintage Hollywood actors who compels me to stop and watch while channel-flipping, who occupy an amount of shelf space among the DVDs I dip into when I'm, say, "in the mood for a Cagney movie" the same way I get in the mood for a good burger or a familiar favorite album in my iTunes library.

Among my favorite bits in movie-ized Shakespeare is Cagney's roisterous comic turn as Bottom in Warner Bros.' 1935 version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, a peculiar viewing experience if you know Cagney only from the tough-guy roles that helped make him an icon of his era. Those roles had already started by then, thanks to his head-turning breakout performance in 1931's The Public Enemy. This is the movie that made a star out of Warner contract player Cagney, who thereafter embodied no-bullshit gangster cool for generations.

Alongside '31's Little Caesar and the following year's Scarface, The Public Enemy made the pulpy tommy-gun melodramas into something, as Box Office said at the time, "absolutely serious from start to finish," something "meant to be taken seriously by the audience." The New York Times noted Warners' "laudable motive" of "apprising the audience that the hoodlums and terrorists of the underworld must be exposed and the glamour ripped from them," and the film's moral that "civilization is on her knees and inquiring loudly as to what is to be done."

Nonetheless, up until the final reel, in The Public Enemy the wages of sin are obvious: a kid street punk with an abusive dad and a talent for petty crime can grow up to be a big-shot racketeer with loads of dough, flashy cars, tailored suits, and beautiful, willing dames. (Too bad about that final reel, but it's a good one too.) The film did such an effective job of showing that, yes, Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta, its prologue and epilogue disclaimers extolling its wholesome social intentions failed to budge the delicate bluenose pressure groups such as the Daughters of the American Revolution and the League of Decency. The Public Enemy's violent realism, scenes blatant in their sexual suggestiveness, and the snappy allure of Cagney's performance helped ring in Hollywood's self-censoring Production Code of 1934, which sanitized criminal and sexual subject matter for years.

Under the masterful guidance of director William A. "Wild Bill" Wellman, Cagney gives The Public Enemy its dynamism and rewatchability. No one else onscreen can hold a candle to him. Originally, Cagney and co-star Edward Woods (as Powers' life-long pal and partner in crime) were cast with their parts here reversed, Woods having the lead role as Powers. But after catching sight of Cagney in action in another film, studio bosses flipped the casting just before shooting began.

With Cagney in the lead, it was guaranteed that volatile mobster Tom Powers was the most attractive and captivating force on the screen. His success proved, if by then there was any doubt, that audiences will go for a charismatic lowlife over a dull hero any day of the week, a lesson Hollywood never forgot.

Cagney's body language and his ease with street-level speech — a holdover from his own youth on the streets of New York City's Hell's Kitchen — were a revelation. Tom was no cartoonish caricature of a thug, and the reviews of the day praised Cagney's naturalism as part of the film's realism. In the documentary featurette on the DVD, Martin Scorsese says that before he shot The Aviator he showed his cast The Public Enemy, and when Cagney's entrance arrived someone exclaimed "Modern screen acting begins."

Keep that "modern screen acting" thought in mind — I'm coming back to that in a moment.

The Public Enemy is, of course, the movie that gave us the most famous grapefruit in Hollywood history:



That's Mae Clarke getting the citrus in the kisser, a moment that took on a life of its own in the decades since (it has even been parodied on The Simpsons) and that has an uncertain origin story. (TCM's page on the film probably provides the best summary.) Clarke is one of several women in the life of Cagney's brutal yet magnetic gangster.

Taking second billing after Cagney is Jean Harlow as the classic bottle-blond Other Woman. Unfortunately, while the rest of the film's "girls" (among them Joan Blondell) are fine, the clanging exception is Harlow, whose line-readings sound so leaden and amateurish that not even Cagney can save her.

One of a harem's worth of Howard Hughes discoveries, Harlow was already a star thanks to Hughes' Hell's Angels the year before. Her lack of acting talent didn't go unmentioned by the critics, although Variety, in its review of Hell's Angels, wisely observed that, "It doesn't matter what degree of talent she possesses ... nobody ever starved possessing what she's got." Regarding The Public Enemy, Variety added, "Harlow better hurry and do something about her voice. She doesn't get the best of it alongside Clarke and Blondell."

I wish I could find an online video of the Harlow-Cagney scene in the image up there to the right. In it her nails-on-a-blackboard voice and unconvincing performance just drain the juice from the scene, illustrating my thesis perfectly. Still, here's the scene where Cagney and Harlow meet:



As much as I enjoy The Public Enemy, Harlow is the bug in the fruit salad for me.

However, when I listened to the DVD's thorough commentary track by author Robert Sklar, I discovered that William Wellman, who had directed actress Louise Brooks three years earlier in Beggars of Life, originally offered her the role that Harlow lead-balloons here. At first Brooks accepted the part, but then changed her mind and went to New York. That decision began the end of her too-short career, and kicked off the decades-long professional and personal downturns that followed.

One of filmdom's rare sui generis evocative beauties, Brooks is best known today for her starring presence as the loose-living showgirl Lulu in German director G.W. Pabst's 1929 classic, Pandora's Box. It's one of the great films of the silent era, which was by then all but subsumed by the talkies.

Pandora's Box gives us an easy dozen images that snapshot our popular impression of Louise Brooks — that exquisite face, which seems made for close-ups; that jet-black helmet-cut bob; an effortless eroticism; a delicacy that's too joyful for a femme fatale yet too knowing for a mere naif.

Pabst had been so struck by Brooks' brief role in Howard Hawks' A Girl in Every Port that he insisted on casting her as the lead in Pandora's Box — after a two-year search for an actress to play the well-established German character Lulu (a search comparable to that for Scarlett O'Hara). Pabst created something of a national scandal when he rejected Marlene Dietrich, a bona fide German star, in favor of this minor Hollywood American player. Brooks ditched Paramount (no love lost on either side) and headed to Berlin.

Pabst treated her with a regard and respect that Hollywood had never given her, even though she irked him by relishing Berlin's "life is a cabaret" energy to a degree that would make Sally Bowles blush. (She later made it up to him by giving the director one night of what she described in her essays as her greatest sexual performance.) While in Europe she made Pandora's Box and Pabst's Diary of a Lost Girl, then Prix de Beauté in France, a project begun with René Clair. Because of these films — although they were not well-received in their time and played in the U.S. and elsewhere muddled by heavily censored recuts — her eventual status as a beloved screen favorite was only waiting to be carved into our cultural marble.

Give all due credit to Pabst, but Brooksie pretty much single-handedly raises Pandora's Box above the doomed-bad-girl melodrama, the kind of one-tone moralistic parable so common in its time. Her deft, restrained performance of "tragic Lulu with no sense of sin" (as Brooks later described her) lifts the script with layers and shadings that wouldn't become common aims for years afterward. The Kansas-born actress didn't choose to play Lulu as a malevolent vamp knowingly attracting then destroying men beneath her heels (Marlene Dietrich would have fallen into that mode with one snarly look), or as some pre-War "Candy," an innocent unaware of the way men and women react to her sexually catalytic presence. Instead she walked that tightrope so tactfully that with repeat viewings we see more within her and may interpret her actions differently with every nuance. She made Lulu unfathomable, a well that always has more to give.

Brooks was not a trained actress. Despite that — or maybe because of it — she brought to the screen a performance style that's regarded as years ahead of its time in its naturalism and lack of pretense. As Brooks herself wrote,

"The great art of films does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body, but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation." 

In other words, film allows an actor to be not merely an animatronic puppet, but a communicator of a character's (and/or the actor's) innermost "thought and soul." In her later journals, she criticized a Garbo performance by noting that "She strains terribly... Is made to read line on top of line without pauses for mental transitions."

Watching Brooks today, we're bowled over by how modern she is, how subtle and unaffected. It's as if she intuitively understood that there's more "transmitted" power in a focused laser beam than in a wide-open spotlight.

Critics today laud Brooks' performance in Pandora's Box for the same modernity we see in Cagney's Tom Powers, and she did it two years before Cagney's entrance.

So it stabs me in the heart to learn that The Public Enemy might have teamed up Cagney and Brooks.

It's a pairing that would have changed the movie enormously, offering an altogether different heft and "reading" to the scenes between Powers and his mistress. Instead of Harlow diminishing those scenes (and the film), Brooks would have amplified and magnified them.

It's hard to imagine Brooks out-acting Cagney, but it's painfully easy to imagine the two of them together working so well that cinema might have witnessed as elemental a pairing as Bogey and Bacall, Hepburn and Tracy, or hydrogen and oxygen. Movies generally, and perhaps the social order, might be different today somehow.

Regrettably for us, Brooks detested Hollywood and its "play along to get along" ethos. As an actress, not to mention as an unapologetic sexual and professional maverick, she was ambitious but reckless. Cocksure but difficult to the point of self-destructive. Independent, emancipated, and willful but too damn temperamental and mercurial to commit to any situation — jobs, husbands, lovers, Hollywood studios — long enough to really get serious roots dug in. She described herself as "a born loner, who was temporarily deflected from the hermit's path by a career in the theatre and films."

It's a "What if?" that colors my viewing of The Public Enemy as I gnash my teeth through Harlow's grating performance. As with my previous Alternate Universe Movies post — "The Maltese Falcon" with Gene Tierney instead of Mary Astor — it's one of those often frustrating ponderables that emerges from the movies' long history of accidental convergences and tauntingly unfulfilled possibilities.



There's an excellent documentary about Brooks, Looking for Lulu, narrated by Shirley MacLaine and produced by Hugh Hefner for Turner Classic Movies. It used to be available on YouTube in six parts, but it's gone now. Find it if you can.

Also, there's much to see at Thomas Gladysz's Louise Brooks Society.

Music: Melody Gardot, Live from Soho
Near at hand: Balls of yarn Elizabeth has left in medias res.

Pic pick: Tex Avery has left the building

Talk about having an old friend for dinner...

Elizabeth and I lived in Portland, OR before moving to Seattle. Among our oldest and best friends there are David Delamare and Wendy Ice. David is a painter. Wendy is president of their joint venture, Bad Monkey Productions (www.daviddelamare.com), and thus is David's manager, publicist, agent, and creative consultant. (She's also occasionally David's co-author and is one of his former models. Find their book Animerotics: A Forbidden Cabaret and you'll see her on the cover. She'll probably always remind me of Louise Brooks, just one of her numerous sterling qualities.)

Together they have built both a love and a business partnership without either one getting seriously injured by kitchen implements or office supplies. They are among our dearest friends and our life is a finer feast because of them.

Now that "finer feast" is a step closer to being literally true. As of this week, David is a restaurant menu theme in the Hamptons — the Last Hope Lagoon Restaurant and Wine Bar in Montauk Beach, NY. David's commercial specialty is his mermaid paintings, and the restaurant is right on the ocean (plus "Delamare" means "from the sea"), so the Last Hope features over 60 of David's prints and most of the menu items are named for his paintings or the characters in his books.

If you find yourself in Montauk, stop by and report back here. Wendy tells us that "The Delamare" is their best-selling sandwich.

You can find more menu page shots among David's Facebook Photos (viewable depending on his privacy settings and Facebook's seemingly capricious whims).

Congrats — and good eats — to David and Wendy. I hope we'll clink glasses and sample each other's desserts there someday.

David, by the way, provided the cover for my short fiction collection Mars Dust & Magic Shows. And his original Cheshire Cat painting from his current Alice in Wonderland project is hanging here in my living room, grinning at me as I type.

Music: Philip Glass, "Heroes" Symphony
Near at hand: Kai's favorite stuffed toy, just returned from the front yard.

Pic pick: "Chungking Express"

Close Encounters of the Cool Job Kind

Here's the Gulliver-like head of my pal Glenn Erickson (who by night dons a mask and rides the cinema countryside as DVD Savant), surveying a visual effects landscape for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, summer 1977. Now whenever I view this scene, I picture his looming noggin about to get creamed with a glowing pie. (Fortunately, Glenn likes pie.)

Makes me consider a slight rewrite of a page in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

"For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across — which happened to be the Earth — where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a special effects technician."

Blazing Saddles (1974) — Excuse me while I whip this out

"Not only was it authentic frontier gibberish, but it expressed a courage that is little seen in this day and age." — Olson Johnson (David Huddleson)

Chalk up Blazing Saddles as only a lampoon of Hollywood westerns and you miss the point by a Texas mile.

I've been thinking about Mel Brooks' R-rated, lowbrow night at the horse opera from 1974 more than usual lately. What brought it to mind this week, for instance, is poor Rand Paul, who can't keep his foot out of his mouth long enough to express how shocked, shocked he is to realize that most folks consider the 1964 Civil Rights Act a good thing. Hey, a full century of post-Civil War self-regulation just did wonders for that Constitutional "common good" stuff.

Not a big surprise, really, in these days of such unhappy but necessary reminders, in which the Tea Party, Fox News "rodeo clowns," the Texas Board of Education, the state of Arizona, and other representative factions of post-2008 American reactionary "movement conservatism" peel back their Archie McPhee rubber masks to reveal the modern face of old-fashioned racism and proud know-nothingism. (Although, granted, as conservative Andrew Sullivan and others smarter than I point out, there's little that's honestly conservative about epistemic closure or the counterfactual paranoia and misdirected, artificially ginned-up spasms of the right's reactionary kitsch. We're going through a phase where "honestly conservative" is pretty much an oxymoron like "Christian militia" or the American Family Association.)

As a satirical flag waving in the racial and social winds of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Blazing Saddles' casual vulgarity, racial epithets, and pants-dropping silliness were spread like the very best butter over the more serious business of iconoclastically upturning expectations and tropes, especially some shibboleths found not just in old-fashioned cowboy movies. Its broad humor was the palliative that let Brooks mock prejudices and, with gloves off, prejudiced people.



Meanwhile, in '74 I was way too young to see the movie, if it played in my small Arkansas community at all, but I was old enough to hear the warnings of the other kids to not ride my bike through the two or three streets collectively known as "nigger town." (My break from organized religion began in the same community five years later, when the pastor of the Presbyterian church my parents carted me to joined with other local religious leaders to form the "Ministerial Alliance" for the purpose of successfully banning, sight unseen, Monty Python's Life of Brian from the local multiplex.)

It seems to me that we could use a new Blazing Saddles right about now. By that I mean a pop hit movie that laughs at institutional redneckery, one that loudly — yet without easy condescension or mean-spiritedness — honks the fat red Bozo nose of the Palin-Beck era.

As much as I love the movie, I find scant pleasure in seeing within it a newly revived currency. Under the heading of "The more things change...", Blazing Saddles from 1974 maps easily enough onto the American scene 2010:

There's Harvey Korman's cynical, silver-tongued politico who exploits the unchallenged racism of the common folks for personal gain. (Think Sarah Palin since 2008, and any number of contenders between the 2010 midterms and 2012, possibly just in time for both a cinematic and electoral When Worlds Collide.)

His chief flunky is Slim Pickens' oafish henchman who starts the Limbaughian "ditto!" trend a bit early.

Together they maneuver under the authority of Mel Brooks' ineffectual governor who's more interested in diddly preoccupations and getting his name in the history books than in legitimate affairs of state. (I'd say Palin again, but I hate repeating myself. Besides, it appears that Governor Le Petomane will actually choose to fulfill his term in office.)

And of course these three stooges work against the natural smarts and charisma of Sheriff Bart (Cleavon Little), the well-spoken, urbane newcomer whose ride into town is greeted with cocked shotguns and an "Up yours, nigger" barked by an apple-cheeked granny. (Do I really need to spell this one out?)

Carrying this wobbly drinking game further, let's go ahead and say that Blazing Saddles' famous campfire beans-and-farts scene works as a metaphor for Congress in session. Meanwhile, Mongo (Alex Karras) is — sure, why not? — the whole hulking Tea Party movement. ("Mongo merely pawn in game of life.")

Yeah, easy partisan shots all. I know it. Still, if the cowboy boot fits....

Blazing Saddles became a surprise box-office hit and the all-time highest-grossing western until 1990's Dances With Wolves. But comedy, like porn and Picassos, is a fundamentally subjective experience, so critical reaction to this anything-goes mishmash of rapid-fire gags, Mad magazine naughtiness, outrageous anachronisms, and disjointed styles was predictably mixed. Critics regarded it as either a rude jumble of sophomoric Borscht Belt shtick stretched to the point of ripping its seams over the film's mod hipster frame, or else a liberating splash of rules-breaking social satire that beat the tar out of Hollywood formulas while simultaneously overturning everyday conventions of racial bigotry, sex, and things you were or were not "supposed" to see or hear on a screen. It was either unashamedly sophomoric or cleverly subversive.

The brilliance of Mel Brooks, back in his heyday at least, was that Blazing Saddles embodied both and all of these things. If his gleefully raunchy farce were about only its "bad taste" or the number of times the word "nigger" gets deployed, then it would be just another forgettable splat on the ever-growing mountain of in-your-face shock comedies.

(Oh, and just to establish terms here: Let's not start with calling Blazing Saddles "politically incorrect," a lazy-ass label redefined and misused so often that it's been bled dry of any useful meaning.)

Not that Brooks sought to make a "message film." After all, we still get the beans-and-farts scene, which is about nothing more than being the first beans-and-farts scene in cinema history. Still, it's fair to say that Blazing Saddles broke ground as well as wind.

In these times when sanctimony and sound-bite puritanism are treated as virtues, we need a Blazing Saddles, a wry, bold, good-hearted taboo-buster that deflates bigots (and their fear that others would monger), while simultaneously suggesting we unclench our sphincters and get over ourselves.

Although the film's plot is at best a secondary concern, it twists the nipples of every Wild West genre staple in the book. Cleavon Little's Bart is a railroad-worker used by villainous Hedley — "not Hedy" — Lamarr (Harvey Korman) and the governor (Brooks, who also appears as a Yiddish Indian Chief) in a dastardly land-snatch scheme. The bad guys are abetted by Slim Pickens and, at first, Madeline Kahn's Teutonic femme fatale from the Elmer Fudd School of Elocution, Lili Von Shtupp. Lamarr talks "The Gov" into appointing black Bart the new sheriff of bandit-besieged Rock Ridge. Their aim is to so offend the little frontier town's "white, God-fearing" folk (all named Johnson — Howard, Van, etc.) that the rightful owners will abandon the territory to the new railroad Lamarr plans to build through it.

For a while the plan works, with Bart confronted with every manner of bigotry from words to gun barrels. Bart, though, has more smarts than everyone else in town put together. Teaming with a washed-up, boozed-up gunslinger, the Waco Kid (Gene Wilder), he sets out to prove himself, save the town, and defeat those who would "stamp out runaway decency in the West."

Everyone onscreen is in fine form. The cast steps into their roles with a sense of fun that keeps Blazing Saddles brisk and sharp. Little and Wilder in particular spark up terrific chemistry. Highlights are plenty, with some (such as the farting scene) having achieved legendary status. Madeline Kahn's note-perfect parody of Marlene Dietrich earned her a second consecutive Academy Award nomination.

In its final fifteen minutes, the narrative (such as it is) comes totally unglued from even its own reality, becoming so anarchic and "meta" that Blazing Saddles could be the American cousin of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which debuted the following year.

Besides the flatulence and coarse language, Blazing Saddles lights the fuses of other cherry bombs and tosses them into our laps with "faggot" jokes, Jewish jokes, and jokes built on certain black male stereotypes ("It's twue, it's twue!"). We get gags at the expense of religious piety, Kahn's uproarious cabaret number about her well-worn nether region ("the dirtiest song I ever wrote," reports Brooks), casual weed-toking by the good guys, and a hundred verbal or visual in-jokes that run the gamut from witty and gut-busting to just plain dumb.

Like a cheese assortment platter, not every item has aged well. Some yucks are now well past their sell-by date ("Yes, the Dr. Gillespie killings"). And with changing times come changing sensibilities and sensitivities. There are two big jokes derived from the act of rape that will always make me squirm.

What keeps the potentially offensive from being genuinely offensive is something that may not be obvious at first viewing: Cleavon Little's Bart is never played as a victim. He is can-do Americana at its fullest expression, and ends up inspiring those who at first would victimize him.

This intelligent, good-looking, elegant black man knows exactly how to play off the idiocy of the asinine white crackers that surround him.



"These are people of the land," consoles the Waco Kid, summarizing Bart's antagonists with perfect deadpan, "The common clay of the new West. You know," — here's where nobody times a pause better than Wilder — "morons."

Even so, there's enough affection on the screen for just about everyone. In the audio commentary on this DVD, Brooks says that the citizens of Rock Ridge aren't villains, just "good people who didn't know any better." Because Bart is smarter and hipper (and, let's say it, kinder), by the end he defeats the bad guys and wins over the locals, who embrace their prairie town's conversion to a melting-pot ideal, assembled before an American flag with no hint of irony or jingoism whatsoever.

In 1972, Brooks was a Catskills comic-turned-writer-turned-director whose only two films, The Producers and The Twelve Chairs, had not generated promising commercial success. He was out of work in New York when a Warner Brothers executive approached him about directing a western-comedy titled Tex X (after Malcolm, get it?) by a first-time screenwriter in his twenties, Andrew Bergman. Warner Brothers had bought Bergman's screenplay and hired Alan Arkin to direct, with James Earl Jones as the black sheriff, but the project died in development hell. Brooks liked its potential and, atypically for a studio project, asked to work with its original writer to develop the script into a full-on western spoof.

Young Bergman was thrilled to work with the veteran showman who had brought The Producers into the world. Together they added other writers to the table, recreating the kind of group experience Brooks remembered from his years working with Sid Caesar on TV's Your Show of Shows.

Brooks wanted a "really good black writer," and hired young nightclub comic Richard Pryor, who was also Brooks' first choice to play the role of Bart. On the film's current DVD and Blu-ray discs, Brooks calls Pryor "the most God-blessed with talent guy I ever saw in my life, and I knew the camera would love him." However, even though Brooks "went on bended knee" begging every studio exec to cast Pryor in the lead, the studio would not risk casting an untried talent reputed to be unreliable and a drug user. Fortunately, Broadway actor Little auditioned for the part, and the pieces fell into place quickly after that.

Brooks and his writing team drew inspiration from old westerns with the same cheeky self-confidence with which they suckled milk from Brooks' younger upstart 1970s colleagues. They loaded their pockets with fist-sized handfuls of John Ford oaters, 1939's Destry Rides Again, and The Magnificent Seven, smooshing them together with the anti-authoritarian zing of the best Marx Brothers comedies. Some of Blazing Saddles' sequences could have been conceived after an all-night viewing marathon in Warner Brothers' Looney Tunes vault.

Brooks scrambled it together with the smart-ass irreverence of other New Hollywood films that flipped a middle-finger attitude. So it's fitting that the American Film Institute's list of 100 best American comedies places Blazing Saddles at #6 between the Marx Brothers' 1933 Duck Soup and Robert Altman's 1970 M*A*S*H.

Comparisons with Brooks' second great 1974 comedy, Young Frankenstein, are inevitable, but they're a mug's game. The two films are superficially similar — colorful sendups of popular film genres — yet they display such differing purpose, style, and execution that it's remarkable that they came from the same director in the same year. The gentler Young Frankenstein is easily the more impressive piece of movie-making, as polished and focused as the Hubble Telescope lens. Plus, Young Frankenstein benefited from the fan-love for its subject that Gene Wilder brought to his own initiating concept and then to his screenplay.

All the same, for my money, sprocket for sprocket, it's Blazing Saddles that's more belly-laugh funny, even after repeated viewings, from its opening theme (Frankie Laine singing a straight-faced spin on his own Mule Train theme) to its closing shot of our heroes riding off (in a chauffeured Cadillac) into the sunset.

After this splendid pair, something went, as they say in the movies, horribly wrong. Silent Movie ('76) still sports some of the old touch, but it's dismaying to see the man behind The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein churning out such a flabby whoopy-cushion as Spaceballs (1987). History of the World, Part 1 ('81), a hodgepodge of loosely connected blackout sketches, has some funny bits, but it strains at the stool like fat Elvis in his final moments. Robin Hood: Men In Tights ('93) is as memorable as an after-dinner mint. The less said about Dracula: Dead and Loving It ('95), the better.

A fundamental ingredient that Brooks' latterday genre parodies lack is a sense of purpose beyond their hit-or-miss humor. Blazing Saddles faced down contemporary racist attitudes, ending with its foot triumphantly planted on racism's chest. Young Frankenstein is more of a tribute to its subject than a lampoon, with respectful affection taking the place of social satire.

After that, Brooks' parodies are only parodies, nothing more, offering little that you can take away afterward. They seem too easy, too throwaway when compared to his pinnacle achievements from 1974, which respected their audiences too much to be just facile crowd-pleasers.

Blazing Saddles laughs at racists, not with them, recalling Brooks' objective in The Producers to "dance on Hitler's grave." While its broadside cannons are mounted to the hull of the most conservative of movie genres, there's nothing overtly partisan or mean-spirited here. It's brash and brazen, yes, but it's not abrasive. Blazing Saddles is playfully disarming at every turn, downright joyful even. You can search through the movie with a magnifying glass, a speculum, and a Geiger counter and still not find an angry, whiny, or uptight moment. Anyone actually offended by Blazing Saddles is someone in dire need of a hearty offending.

Nonetheless, during production Brooks worried that Blazing Saddles might be too offensive for its own good. He asked a studio executive about the farting scene, a risky moment that had never been done in a movie. The exec told him, "Mel, if you're going to go up to the bell, ring it." After the premiere, the head of Warner Brothers told Brooks to take out the word "nigger," the farting scene, the moment when Alex Karras appears to punch a horse, and the sex between Lili Von Shtupp and Bart. But Brooks ignored him and the film became a hit nationwide. "Can you imagine," Brooks asks us in the commentary track, "What if I'd not had final cut?"

Now, thirty-six years on, I have trouble imagining any A-list studio, including Warner Brothers, having the gumption and guts to let Brooks, or anyone else, ring some of those bells today. But heaven knows they should.  

On the other hand, in 1974 we didn't have South Park, Jon Stewart, or Stephen Colbert, and it's hard to argue that we aren't a better, smarter, certainly a more amused culture now because of them. So maybe it's worked out okay.

Blazing Saddles hosed down moviegoers with such audacity that it became a permission slip for other comics and filmmakers who came afterward, from the brothers Zucker and Farrelly to Saturday Night Live, South Park and others. For nearly four decades its popularity has remained sturdy, manifesting an enviable staying power and a fan following that may have earned Blazing Saddles the prize for Most Quotable Movie Ever. As Brooks puts it, "It's still paying for my beans."

Music: Ringo Starr, "Never Without You"
Near at hand: Connie Willis' Blackout