The Magnificent ’74: Blazing Saddles

“Allow me to grow,” said Richard Pryor to the magazine Ebony in 1980, defending his decision to swear off using a certain racial slur in his comedy. His turning point had come the year before, during a trip to Kenya. Sitting in a Nairobi hotel, he’d had an epiphany, realising that such loaded terms, even when self-administered, and even when they’d become a cornerstone of his success, were “a trick, like genocide on the brain”.

But in 1974 – the year of both his first credited feature screenwriting gig, on Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles, and his breakthrough, Grammy-winning, third standup album, That N*****r’s Crazy – Pryor was still in the heady heyday of his N-word reclamation project, deploying it constantly, as he wrote in his 1995 autobiography Pryor Convictions: And Other Life Sentences, in order to “take the sting out of it… as if saying it over and over again would numb me and everybody else to its wretchedness”. Fifty years later, it is this unreconstructed earlier stance, licensed at least partially by Pryor’s presence on the film’s writing team (along with Brooks, Norman Steinberg, Andrew Bergman and Alan Uger), that gives Blazing Saddles such a complicated sociopolitical legacy. Which is pretty funny for a movie in which the most famous gag is about how eating all those beans sure made cowboys fart a lot.

The diff iculties in assessing Blazing Saddles now are such that it ’s tempting to set it aside for something less headachy, like quantum entanglement. But even a glancing survey of 1974 at the movies has to consider Brooks’s film: not only would the February release go on to be the highest-grossing movie to premiere that year, but it was followed in December by another Brooks joint, Young Frankenstein, the fourth-biggest 1974-dated moneymaker. By fielding two of his most successful box-office-dominating movies — both of which still regularly ride high in all-time-funniest lists — in the same year as The Conversation and The Godfather Part II, Brooks essentially became the Coppola of comedy.

In fact, the first racial insult uttered in Blazing Saddles, a spoof about a “dazzling urbanite” Black sheriff (played by Cleavon Little) appointed to a frontier town full of racist hicks, is not the N-word but a racial epithet for a Chinese person. A railroad labourer – we assume he’s Chinese underneath that conical straw hat – drops dead of heat exhaustion, prompting grinning overseer Lyle, played with toothy, stupefied slyness by Burton Gilliam, to insist that the remaining Black workers improve morale by singing “a good ol’ n***** work song”. A little over a minute in, we’ve already seen the two main arguments that the film’s more indignant defenders deploy (aside from “but it was co-written by Richard Pryor!” and “but the hero is Black!”). First, only the bad guys or their fellow travellers use the N-word. And second, its political incorrectness does not just target African Americans. Every conceivable minority is dealt an offhand insult or two by the screenplay’s self-consciously button-pushin’, rib-pokin’ bad taste. Mexicans, the Irish, Jews, Indigenous Americans – not to mention the elderly, the female, those with learning disabilities and, most egregiously, the gay community – no one is safe from Brooks’s blunderbuss approach to what were, and remain, some of the most delicate issues of the day.

But if this gives the impression of Blazing Saddles as an equal-opportunity offence giver, some offences are more equal than others. In primarily aiming its satire at anti-Black racism, all its other ‘isms’ are left rather more open to critique. Not much defence can be mounted against charges of homophobia, for example, when none of its heroes are gay, despite the vaguely effete coding of Gene Wilder’s wonderfully offbeat turn as the soft-spoken Waco Kid. And it ’s solely the talents of modern miracle Madeline Kahn that offset the underwritten sexism of her role as Lili Von Shtüpp, with some inspired physicality, and accent work that is roughly four parts Marlene Dietrich to one part Elmer Fudd. Both these standout characters are direct parodies of western archetypes: Wilder plays a version of Dean Martin’s melancholic alcoholic character from Rio Bravo (1959); Kahn is an air-quotes reiteration of Dietrich’s Frenchy from Destry Rides Again (1939). That these two performances are so cherishable indicates just how much of the film’s pleasure lies far away from its controversies, in the affectionate spoofing of classic genre movies – which Brooks would deliver to a more consistent degree with Young Frankenstein.

Even critics leery of its divisive approach to race relations can find a lot to love in the film’s movie-world lampoonery, epitomised in a fourth-wall-demolishing final act which, aside from the eye-wateringly homophobic Busby Berkeley musical section, delivers a gonzo groin-kick to the Hollywood system of the time. But ‘of the time’ is key: Blazing Saddles is Exhibit A in the ‘ you couldn’t make it today’ lament of the self-appointed crusader against ‘woke culture’. They’re right, but not because the 70s were some halcyon era of permissiveness and racial harmony. The nature and flavour of the racisms we experience today – and even the Hollywood we tussle with in 2024 – are simply not the same as they were 50 years ago. Blazing Saddles barely got made in 1974 and could not be made today, and it doesn’t undermine its place in the comedy canon to say that is no bad thing. A movie cannot revise itself, cannot learn, cannot have an epiphany in a hotel lobby and decide to change its tune. But us? Allow us, please, to grow.