Mel Brooks: 5 essential films

Mel Brooks’s first feature film has become the stuff of legend, spawning not only a successful Broadway musical – which itself became a film – but also an entire season of Curb Your Enthusiasm. It’s basically a theatrical in-joke – two Broadway impresarios put on the worst musical ever produced in order to hoodwink the shareholder but are surprised to find that their sure-fire flop becomes a hit. But it’s done with such immense love for its setting and its characters, the extravagant Max Bialystock played by the reliably oversized Zero Mostel, and Leo Bloom, portrayed by the then little-known Gene Wilder, that it seems universal.

It set Brooks off on a path which soon became a series of trademarks – broad comic caricatures, ethnic Jewish humour, gags piling up in struggling heaps and, most of all, a level of tastelessness which almost becomes its own art form. Here we have the first great Brooks bad-taste joke – the production number ‘Springtime for Hitler’ – and many people still consider it his best, an example of what Brooks once called “good bad taste”.

the “gay romp with Adolf and Eva through Berchtesgaden” which gets funnier and more outrageous the longer it goes on.

“The movie was like a bomb going off inside the audience’s sense of propriety.” Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

This was Brooks’s big breakout success and a film that became legendary among a whole generation of people who would never look at a plate of beans in the same way again. With immense affection, if not self-discipline, Brooks parodies the clichés of 70 years of westerns while throwing in as many sight gags and one-liners as he can possibly fit into 90 minutes. Eventually, the action spills over into the studio lot itself which allows him to include some Nazis and a self-referential happy ending. Some critics dislike this finale but I just couldn’t do without the scenes with choreographer Buddy Bizarre rehearsing a dance number called ‘The French Mistake’.

In the midst of such craziness, Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder deserve medals for playing it straight as the black sheriff and his gunfighter pal and they add a touch of sincerity which makes their friendship genuinely touching. Meanwhile, a genuine western star, Slim Pickens, joins in the fun by sending himself up something rotten.

the one-liners you missed when you watched it last time – “They lose me after the bunker scene” and “I’m parked by the commissary” will do for a start. 

“God darned if the whole fool enterprise is not worth the attention of any moviegoer with a penchant for what one actor, commenting on another’s Gabby Hayes imitation, calls ‘authentic western gibberish’.” Richard Schickel, Time Magazine

Although it may not be his funniest film, lacking the sheer anything-goes bravado of its predecessor, Young Frankenstein is Brooks at his most consistent and artful. The laughs keep coming, the plot coheres and resolves, and the Universal horror-inspired visual style is maintained throughout. It’s a broad pastiche of Son of Frankenstein (1939), which gives a fine opportunity for Gene Wilder – as Frederick Fronkensteen – to practise his inimitable comic style of building up from slow-burn to hysteria. The comic set-pieces, such as Wilder and Peter Boyle (playing the Monster) performing ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’, are carefully integrated into the whole, which means that Marty Feldman’s breaking of the fourth wall seems a witty contrast rather than just part of a general madness.

The supporting cast has a lot of fun too, with Kenneth Mars standing out as Inspector Kemp, complete with prosthetic arm, and Cloris Leachman channelling her inner Mrs Danvers as Frau Blucher.

Gerald Hirschfeld’s glowing black-and-white cinematography and John Morris’s music, both of which capture the Universal style to perfection.

“It’s what used to be called a crazy comedy, and there hasn’t been this kind of craziness on the screen in years.” (Pauline Kael, The New Yorker)

It’s dangerous to try and parody Alfred Hitchcock since Hitchcock was already in on the joke. However, Brooks manages to score some hits in High Anxiety, largely by taking some of Hitch’s most famous set-pieces to their logical, usually sexual or scatological, conclusion. The scene inspired by the attack of The Birds (1963) is easy enough to predict, but there’s a very funny spin on the shower scene from Psycho (1960) and a conclusion which manages to combine Vertigo (1958) with The Wizard of Oz (1939).

What’s best about the film though is Brooks himself, who has never been so natural or so likeable on screen. He’s in his element playing straight man to a host of grotesques – familiar faces crop up frequently – and relishes the chance to get romantic with the wonderful Madeleine Kahn. He even has a very creditable stab at becoming a cabaret singer by devising a whole scene simply so he can sing the title song, complete with small talk and whiplashing the microphone cord.

Brooks regulars Harvey Korman and Cloris Leachman at their most unbridled and Mel Brooks at his most relaxed.

After seeing the film, Alfred Hitchcock sent Brooks a case of wine as “a small token of my pleasure.”

The most popular of Brooks’s later films is probably Spaceballs (1987), a parody of Star Wars that gave the world Dark Helmet and Pizza the Hut, but instead I’m going to give the last nod in this retrospective to History of the World Part One.

The film, divided into several parts, is the very definition of scattershot, packed with so many gags that it doesn’t matter when some don’t so much miss their target as fizzle in the barrel. The lengthy Roman sequence is memorable mostly for Dom DeLuise’s gluttonous Emperor Nero and a selection of jokes even older than the setting, while the final scenes set during the French Revolution manage to waste the considerable talents of Cloris Leachman and Spike Milligan. But there are absolutely wonderful things along the way – Sid Caesar’s slapstick guide to the Dawn of Man, John Hurt playing Jesus at the Last Supper, Hitler on Ice, and Brooks himself playing Moses. 

The song and dance number set during the Spanish Inquisition – a tasteless tour-de-force to rival ‘Springtime for Hitler’. 

“It’s difficult to dislike Brooks’s parody of the historical epic, as old-fashioned as it is anarchic…” (RM, Time Out)

Comedy Genius, a season of side-splitting film and TV, ran at BFI Southbank, on BFI Player and at venues across the UK, from October 2018 to January 2019.