Thursday, December 22, 2011

Blazing Saddles

It seemed only fitting to follow a Randolph Scott film with Blazing Saddles (1974), and The Younger Son had never seen it before. Blazing Saddles is a Mel Brooks film, a comedy Western, and stars Cleavon Little, Gene Wilder, Madeline Kahn, Harvey Korman, Slim Pickens and Dom DeLuise. Count Basie has a cameo.

trailer:


Slant Magazine calls it "a limp, shapeless mess of a film". DVD Journal says,
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 are 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 humor is the palliative that lets Brooks mock prejudices and, with gloves off, prejudiced people.
Roger Ebert says,
"It's a crazed grabbag of a movie that does everything to keep us laughing except hit us over the head with a rubber chicken. Mostly, it succeeds. It's an audience picture

1 comment:

  1. My daughter is 26, and she finds Blazing Saddles use of the N word offensive. I on the other hand can't stop laughing.

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