Mel Brooks is perhaps the greatest living film writer/director, which is saying something considering he flourished in an era of giants. He won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar in a year in which his competitors included John Cassvetes and Stanley Kubrick & Arthur C. Clarke. He is also a stupendous songwriter as well as a sometimes uproarious raconteur. (I have seen him live several times and even written up some of those events for the American Cinematheque.)
His recent memoir, All About Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business (Ballantine Books, 2001), is disappointing and even reveals some of the shortcomings of his monumental oeuvre, but it’s an informative and entertaining reading experience.
In addition to his aforementioned vocations, he also worked as a Borscht Belt comedian, television writer, and comedy album writer/performer. I am less familiar with these works, but I suspect his reputation for excellence in them is well-earned.
Perhaps it is understandable his memoir would be a lesser work—no one is good at everything—but its relative lack of humor is perhaps the biggest disappointment.
One of the book’s problems is its scattershot nature. It is to be expected if the author’s memory is not entirely consistent and that he can write more about recent Broadway endeavors, with more detail, than his 1970 film, the critic and fan favorite The Twelve Chairs. It is also understandable that some subjects are more painful to address than others. However, some of the best writing (including his) is personal and painful. Brooks’s first wife is barely mentioned. A favorite hotel room gets significantly more text. If my memory is accurate, he doesn’t even mention her hame. (She is mentioned so briefly it’s hard to find the reference in the text.) He also does not mention his famous friend Carl Reiner’s last day during the 2020 Los Angeles lockdown dystopia, much of which was spent with Brooks by Reiner’s side. Given the nonagenarian’s strikingly sharp memory (I have witnessed it many times, relatively recently), and his detailed accounts of his Brooklyn childhood and World War II service in the European theater (both of which are highlights), memory is unlikely to be the reason he omitted much of anything. Maybe it was too personal a subject, and surely some things should be kept to oneself, but Reiner’s final hours were fairly well-documented and -reported.
The relative lack of humor is more of a letdown. Maybe his legendary humor just doesn’t come across in literary form.
Brooks (and his editor) betray a lack of full understanding of his work. He does not know the difference between parody and satire (or does not care about it) and frequently uses “satire” in a parodic context. The editor is likely relatively young and part of one of the generations where such confusions are to be expected, but Brooks was born in 1926 and is from a more informed, conceptually precise era.
Brooks’s comedy is at its best when he uses beloved film genres as the subject, not object, of humor. The object of most of the humor in Blazing Saddles is racism, bigotry, and government corruption/idiocy. In All About Me! he confirms that he also intended to ridicule the Western genre (and other genres in other films)—that it was also an object of his humor, however more lovingly he used it as an object. Critics who point out that Brooks is part of a culture that tears down all values have a point. This “nothing is sacred” attitude is part of what killed the Western. The Blazing Saddles sets and other Western sets at Warner Bros. studios were dismantled in the nineties because Westerns, a genre that dramatized independence and American rugged individualism, were no longer made. It’s one thing to ridicule Adolf Hitler; it’s something else entirely to ridicule what John Wayne represented onscreen. (Wayne wisely turned down an opportunity to play “the Waco Kid” in Blazing Saddles even though he loved the screenplay.)
All About Me! is replete with behind-the-scenes details of Brooks’s multiple careers, many of which are fascinating—even the business details, which are less important than the artistic details. However, there are so many different people he mentions in his disparate industries it can be hard for a reader to retain them all. Paring down some of these references and stories would have been conducive to a smoother reading experience.
The author also spends a little too much time on the awards he won, from Oscars and Tonys to government honors. The people who bestow those things are inconsistent. Most of them are unimportant. Many of them are deleterious, culturally and otherwise. Brooks says he refused to be recognized by the Kennedy Center Honors the first time it was offered to him, during the George W. Bush administration, due to Bush’s Iraq war policies. That’s fine. But he practically swoons over Obama, another real-life example of Blazing Saddles’s William J. Lepetomane. Obama broke campaign promises to bring troops home and bollixed foreign policy with disastrous effects for the troops. Brooks had no problem accepting the Kennedy Center Honors when Obama was president.
Despite the book’s weaknesses, it has definite strengths.
Brooks expends at length about his family and childhood in Brooklyn and his military service. These chapters, with previously little-known information, are page turners.
There are many details of his post-military life that are poignant and even esoteric. His late wife Anne Bancroft is properly singled out for praise. She was an encouraging individual in the lives of Mel and their son Max, a bestselling author. When Mel needed songs for his projects, she convinced him he could write them (lyrics and music) better than anyone, when no one else (including him) thought he could. (“Hope for the Best, Expect the Worst”, the theme to The Twelve Chairs, is a personal favorite. The film is based on a Russian novel set shortly after the Bolshevik revolution, and Brooks describes how he intended the song to hypostatize the Russian attitude toward life, especially at that time. Unfortunately, the song now reifies the emotional state of my country now.) On a more positive note, when Max was diagnosed with dyslexia, Bancroft became an expert on the condition and worked with him, enabling her son to become a bestselling author. Details of his directing work are equally fascinating, from the unique silent film set of Silent Movie to Albert Whitock’s glass matte paintings of High Anxiety. (“High anxiety” is a term Brooks says he coined that is now used in serious psychological contexts.) Little known anecdotes about Alfred Hitchcock are also indispensable. Of interest: The Producers became a musical only because of the suggestion and repeated exhortations of David Geffen, who eventually convinced a reluctant Brooks. Brooks’s post-Seventies career, including this book, is illustrative of the decline of culture since the Seventies and Eighties, including its trends of too many adaptations, sequels, retreads, and regurgitations … and the decline of the Western and other romanticist, individualistic genres. (Brooks is currently working on History of the World Part II, another idea he said he never intended to do. It’s understandable enough to be less ambitious at age ninety-six, but his epigones and successors have no excuse.)
The most indispensable aspect of the book is its confirmation that Brooks is alive and active well into his nineties. He is an institution and a treasure from a better cultural era.
All About Me! Is recommended for avid Brooks fans but probably not worth the time for anyone else.
While Mel Brooks was busy in Los Angeles lockdown dystopia writing his book, I was writing fiction and watching many films, waiting for the venues where I worked to finally reopen. I watched The Mel Brooks Collection and reviewed it. This was published at my Mencken’s Ghost weblog on July 17 and 19, 2021.
In honor of his recent ninety-fifth birthday, here is a review of The Mel Brooks Collection (Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment 8DVD, 2006). The set includes eight films, seven of which Brooks directed and wrote or co-wrote. He produced and starred in the exception. The DVDs have varying amounts of special features. Some are extensive; others include only trailers.
Reviews of the first four films are below.
Blazing Saddles (1974) is perhaps Mel Brooks’s finest achievement. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn of cinema, it is an integration of visual stylization; compelling, valid thematic force; and uncompromising, pugilistic humor. It is also about the only valid use of “postmodernism” or reflexivity in all of culture.
1973 was and wasn’t a different culture. It was different because Mel Brooks and company made Blazing Saddles and were able to make it. It was the same because they almost weren’t able to make it, then Warner Bros. almost didn’t release it.
Andrew Bergman, later known for writing and directing The Freshman, wrote a treatment/synopsis titled Tex X. The idea was more or less Malcolm X in the old west, twentieth century Harlem culture and street lingo set in the nineteenth century frontier. Bergman sold it and thought he’d never have anything further to do with it if it was even made at all. To his surprise, Mel Brooks called him and asked him to co-write a screenplay with him and the rest of a team of writers he was assembling. Brooks thought that the idea would work best with the kind of collaborative, all-in-one-room writing style he had experienced on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows. The team he assembled this time also included Norman Steinberg; his writing partner, dentist Alan Uger; and Richard Pryor. Pryor was a relatively obscure comedian Brooks wanted to play Bart, the lead role. When Warner Bros. refused since Pryor was not well known and too known for edgy humor in certain circles, Brooks almost shelved the project then and there. Brooks found Cleavon Little, Pryor approved of his casting, and the project was on. (For a period of time … there would be further snafus and near disasters, as Brooks recounts in an interview included on the DVD in this collection.)
Blazing Saddles introduced many firsts for Mel Brooks. He used these methods or features for the rest of his career, on and off, with mixed results afterwards. After writing his first two films alone, he used a team of writers this time. It was his first spoof. He introduced recurring gags (some would eventually recur over multiple films). And he introduced reflexivity. Reflexivity is the (usually hideous) “postmodern” concept of being self-referential in a cinematic context: constant asides by the cast and writers that they are making a movie, they are in a movie, and you are watching a movie. In the interest of avoiding “spoilers”, two examples should be sufficient: Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman) constantly corrects others calling him “Hedy”. Governor Lepetomane (Brooks) says, “This is 1874; you’ll be able to sue her!” (“Lepetomane” loosely translates as “the fart maniac” and is inspired by a French guy by that name who farted to the rhythm of pieces of music onstage in front of an audience.) In another scene, Bart rides across the desert on a horse with a Gucci bag (in 1874) while Count Basie and His Orchestra’s “April in Paris” is heard on the soundtrack. Suddenly, Basie and the orchestra are performing the tune in the middle of the desert, and Bart shakes Basie’s hand. Reflexivity is often associated with “serious” modernist directors like Jean Luc Goddard. Brooks is the only serious director who pulls it off, and he never did it again as successfully as he did here. Perhaps a zany Mel Brooks spoof is the only context in which “breaking the fourth wall” is palatable.
The reflexivity is hardly the only potentially offensive part of the film. Two years or so before Bicentennial Nigger, Pryor and company wrote enough racial slurs to be “canceled” forever. In fact, today’s audiences would be triggered before Taggart (Slim Pickens) says, “I hired you people to get a bit of track laid, not to jump around like a bunch of Kansas City faggots!” a few minutes into the film.
That this pro-individualist film, like Twain’s novel, is an example of true anti-racism (unlike the currently modish, racist “anti-racism”) should go without saying, but nothing goes without saying anymore. It is also, like Twain’s novel, a work that skewers authoritarianism, ridiculing elected and unelected statists of all parties with the immortal line: “Gentlemen, we’ve got to protect our phoney baloney jobs!” This film’s theme, that race is irrelevant to moral worth and efficacy and should be ignored, is poignant and valid. It’s also hard-hitting, then and now. Bart is a freer and more articulate Jim the Slave, and the Waco Kid (Gene Wilder) is an older and wiser Huckleberry Finn. But the problems Twain wrote about persisted. Arguably, they are worse in some ways than when Brooks made this film.
Blazing Saddles, Brooks’s third film, may be his peak as both an example of a film as an integrated whole and as a work of visual direction. Panoramic desert shots are seamlessly edited with stylized interior scenes.
Like he did for most (all?) of his films, Brooks the songwriter wrote memorable tunes. The lyrics are all his, but scorer John Morris wrote the music to the title song. If you listen, you can tell they didn’t tell vocalist Frankie Laine this wasn’t a “serious” western (even though it certainly was a serious western).
This triumph was a collaborative effort like all films, from Morris’s score to the team of writers to Madeline Kahn’s Marlene Dietrich homage to Mongo (ex-football player Alex Karras) to John Howard’s editing. Appropriately given its reality-bending framework reminiscent of certain cartoons, it is the only Brooks film on Warner Bros. The cartoon theme and studio lot are both featured.
Collaborative or not, it is the integrated vision of its director and the quintessential Mel Brooks film.
High Anxiety, released three years after Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, is Brooks’s loving spoof of the Hitchcockian filmic universe. (Hitchcock approved.) It is both a fun, funny ride of a film and sort of the start of Brooks’s aesthetic decline.
The second of two films written with Ron Clark, Rudy DeLuca, and Barry Levinson, all four writers appear in the film. Levinson, perhaps best known for directing Rain Man, acts as the bellhop who “stabs” Dr. Richard Thorndyke (Brooks) with a newspaper in his hotel shower. This may be this film’s most famous sequence. The anxious, acrophobic Thorndyke character has been invited to run a mental institution experiencing mysterious deaths.
Brooks’s title song is a highlight, as are the Vertigo-inspired San Francisco locations and Family Plot-inspired Los Angeles locations. Another highlight is the spoof of The Birds (no “spoilers” here—watch it). As was starting to be typical of later Brooks, the film is not about much (except perhaps a lampooning of the mental health field, which deserves it even more now). The reflexivity is sparser and generally effective.
History of the World: Part I (1981) suffered from lack of collaborators. It was the only time Brooks did all of the writing and producing himself. He also starred and directed. His first screenplay without a single collaborator in over a decade, it’s the kind of film that looks better to the ten-year-old I was when I first saw it than to an older, more sophisticated individual. The highlights are a 2001: A Space Odyssey spoof of prehistoric man with Brooks’s mentor Caesar as a caveman and the Spanish Inquisition as a Busby Berkeley spoof. The latter tune was co-written with future screenwriting collaborator Ronny Graham (Spaceballs). The film is a series of sophomoric (and occasionally soporific) gags with a few gems in between. The parts are better than the whole, and there’s no theme. There’s nothing wrong with meaningless entertainment, but Brooks is capable of better art and this is consequently one of his weaker films. Only a Jew like Brooks could get away with “The Spanish Inquisition” (with Brooks as Torquemada) and “Jews in Space” (stay tuned to the end), even then. No one could do it now. Brooks not only wrote, produced, and directed, he also starred in virtually every sequence. He played Moses. He played “stand-up philosopher” Comicus in ancient Rome (he plays “Caesar’s Palace”, complete with the casino logo). He played Louis XVI, and he played Louis’s identical “piss boy”. Brooks may have known he needed a rest after this. He never wrote another screenplay without help again, and he hired others (including Graham) to write and direct his next film.
Like everything else in this set, it is worth watching and has its moments. Brooks deserves accolades for supererogation directing and performing in “The Spanish Inquisition”. Given rampant historical ignorance, young (and not-so-young) people will probably even learn a bit from the film.
Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), inspired by the success of Robin Hood: Price of Thieves (and, likely, Spaceballs), is another attempt at a popular spoof for the Spaceballs generation. It isn’t as good as either film.
Brooks lightened his load for this one, appearing only briefly as Rabbi Tuchman (who else?) and apparently doctoring a story and script by Evan Chandler and J. David Shapiro. His Tuchman is a highlight. In theory, the lighter load should have helped as he aged and he never again acted as much as he did in Spaceballs. This one has fewer laughs than any previous Brooks film with the possible exception of The Twelve Chairs (which is a much better film).
Spaceballs had a rock soundtrack, with the likes of Bon Jovi, Van Halen, and The Spinners, who recorded the title song co-written with Brooks. This time, Brooks tried to please the rap generation. The results are better left unsaid (but isn’t most rap?).
A young, thin Dave Chappelle is a highlight of the cast. He’s not the equivalent of a Brooks, Carlin, etc., but he’s about as interesting and notable as mainstream culture gets, nowadays. Richard Lewis is miscast, reportedly intentionally, as Prince John. Cary Elwes is a better hero than most serious films were featuring by 1993. The reflexivity is overdone in this one. Brooks the director deserves some praise for one scene in which a long parade of armored knights falls into each other with a domino effect, but this is another film where the parts are greater than the whole (and most of the parts aren’t that good). Brooks had also lost a great deal of his edge by then; the film is significantly less politically incorrect than its immediate predecessor (Spaceballs).
Part II
(Part I is here. Do, as they say, stay tuned through the final credits and beyond.
After 1974, Brooks had attained the critical and commercial success that ensured he could make just about any film of his choosing. The momentum of his two 1974 films released in rapid succession particularly cemented his reputation as one of the top prospects in Hollywood at the time, a reliable box office phenomenon who made films aesthetically and socially relevant.
The next film he chose to make was Silent Movie (1976). In a sense, it was the beginning of his decline, but it remains an entertaining, unique oddity that paradoxically started the formula for the second part of his career (in which he made all sound films, of course).
As far as I know, it had been approximately forty years since the last major motion picture that could be considered a silent movie was released. Charlie Chaplin released Modern Times, his “farewell” to silent cinema, in 1936. Silent Movie includes some obvious and not-so-obvious homages to the film, including the sound of a human voice. The film’s director also stars in the film—a first for Brooks in this case.
The storyline is basic: Brooks’s Mel Funn is a former big shot Hollywood director whose career was destroyed by alcoholism. He pitches his idea for his big comeback, a silent movie, to the head of Big Picture Studios (“If it was big, it was made here”). The mogul, played by Brooks’s mentor Sid Caesar, has just received a note that the studio is facing financial ruin unless a quick hit is forthcoming. He originally vehemently rejects the idea. When Funn pledges to enlist the biggest stars in Hollywood for his novelty project, the mogul gives him a chance. Funn and his cohorts Marty Eggs (Marty Feldman) and Dom Bell (Dom DeLuise) joyride around Hollywood, enlisting the biggest stars of the mid-seventies, including James Caan, Burt Reynolds, Liza Minelli, and, of course, Anne Bancroft (Mrs. Mel Brooks), engaging in zany, slapstick antics along the way. There is only one rejection: Marcel Marceau, whose “Non!” is the only word on a soundtrack filled with music and sound effects. Spoiling their efforts are Engulf & Devour, a company trying to acquire Big.
Silent Movie may be Brooks’s only silent movie, but it is the first of many in which he stars and the first of two written by the writing team of Brooks, Ron Clark, Rudy DeLuca, and Barry Levinson (after a story by Clark, here). All writers but Clark appear here. In this one, Brooks is Funn and DeLuca and Levinson are members of the Engulf & Devour board. (Levinson would go on to write and direct many films; he is perhaps best known for Rain Man.)
The novelty of a silent movie in color in 1976 lifts an entertaining, fun picture above average status. The period Los Angeles locations are another highlight. (I think I recognize the Crest Westwood near Wilshire Boulevard during the climactic movie screening scene.) But this movie is the start of Brooks wearing too many hats, scattering his formerly focused attention, and making movies without theme or purpose (except to entertain and amuse). He didn’t produce this (that would start with High Anxiety), and the writing team helped save this and the next film. Eventually, his routine became repetitive and crude. Silent Movie is still classy, classic Brooks in that respect, though its appeal to younger and general audiences, who may not understand the irony of Marceau speaking the only word, may be limited. The film is a fun ride (pun intended) but isn’t about anything except perhaps the irrationality of the movie industry or the wondrous magic of decent cinema.
On the set of Robin Hood: Men in Tights circa 1992, DeLuise called this his favorite of Brooks’s films.
The Twelve Chairs (1970) is the most atypical film in this box set. It is not a spoof, and reflexivity is about nonexistent. Brooks scripted it by himself from a Russian novel set in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. There would presumably be minimal comedy to be mined from that ore, but he’s Brooks—he’ll find it.
Which does not mean the film would appeal to all (or even most) Brooks fans. It brings the drab, dun, cynical Soviet Union to life onscreen, and it does so in a way that is congruent with the style and tone of Russian literature. The malevolence of the story is reminiscent of nineteenth century European naturalist literature, e.g., Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace”. A dying woman tells her son-in-law (Ron Moody) that she sewed jewels into the lining of the back of one of a set of twelve dining room chairs that used to belong to the family. He sets off across most of Russia to find the one bejeweled chair … but will he find it? Brooks has a fairly prominent role (a first for him, at least in a film of his own). Frank Langella and future Brooks staple DeLuise round out the cast.
Occasional unsubtle touches akin to “The Department of Furniture That Is Not Chairs” reminds who is at the helm, but this was of limited appeal during its 1970 arthouse run. When he panned Life Stinks in 1991, Gene Siskel recommended this as his home video of the week, praising it as the equal of Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. It’s not that good, but those with the attention spans and interest will find much value here. After another thirty years, those people are even fewer and farther between than when Siskel recommended it.
Brooks’s theme song, “Hope for the Best (Expect the Worst)”, may be his best. It is certainly his most mordant.
To Be or Not to Be is an oddity. It is the only film in this set neither written nor directed by Brooks, it is the only film (as far as I know) in which he starred but did not direct (or write or co-write), and it’s the only one of his films that is an acknowledged, undisputed remake. It was scripted by Thomas Meehan and Ronny Graham, with whom he would later collaborate on Spaceballs. (Graham co-wrote “The Spanish Inquisition”, a highlight of History of the World: Part I, with Brooks.) Alan Johnson directed this workmanlike remake of the Ernst Lubitsch classic written by Edwin Justus Mayer and Melchior Lengyel. Occasional touches of Brooksian reflexivity remind viewers who was in the producer’s chair.
The film opens with one of its best scenes: Brooks and Anne Bancroft (starring together for once) singing “Sweet Georgia Brown” in Polish onstage. Shortly thereafter, the couple argues backstage in Polish. Suddenly, a brash, stentorian voiceover intones: “Ladies and gentlemen: In the interest of clarity and sanity, the rest of this movie will not be in Polish.” (It is a comedy Brooksfilms production, after all.)
And the rest of this movie is an enjoyable throwback to the interwar period. I don’t know how faithful it is to the Lubitsch original (I should). I suspect not very: Lubitsch’s films are more integrated and detailed, interconnected via dialogue, than the 1980s audiences would abide (though they were closer to 1940s audiences than today’s). This film isn’t that cerebral and is not particularly political or ideological despite its setting. Brooks and Bancroft play a thespian couple in Poland. Brooks’s character is lesser known and regarded than Bancroft’s. They soon act for much higher stakes as Nazis invade Poland. First, the couple’s theater troupe tries to deceive the invading Nazis. Later, Bronski (Brooks) stands in for one they killed defending their theater and their country. The cast includes Tim Matheson, Graham, George Wyner (later Colonel Sandurz in Spaceballs), and the legendary Jose Ferrer. Charles Durning was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance.
After History of the World: Part I, Brooks took a much-needed rest from writing and directing. This is essentially the beginning of his next repertory group of collaborators—Meehan, Graham, and Wyner. The cast’s curtain call on the theater stage during the closing credits is an effective landing and includes a touching Brooksian gag (you have to watch the entire film to understand it). This remake is a snapshot of a transitional period in cinema and culture. It was probably the last time a Lubitsch film could be remade.
Young Frankenstein is the last film in the set and the last Brooks film considered a classic. It is not quite as well written or as important as The Producers or Blazing Saddles, but it is required viewing (and re-viewing).
Gene Wilder pitched the idea to Brooks during the Blazing Saddles era and asked him to direct and co-write. They made these two in rapid succession, and both were officially released in 1974. Wilder forbade Brooks from appearing in it due to his excessive reflexivity/fourth wall breaking. (“I don’t trust you,” he jokingly said, according to Brooks.) Although the credits only acknowledge the famous Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley novel, this is essentially a remake of the 1939 Universal sequel Son of Frankenstein. In an interview on the DVD special features, Wilder acknowledges it only as one of several “influences”, but the storyline is exceptionally similar to Young Frankenstein.
Wilder plays Frederick Frankenstein, the great-grandson of Victor. Frederick is an influential young doctor and teacher of medicine who dismisses his great-grandfather’s work as impossible and vain. This changes after he is invited to the old castle to collect his inheritance … and he sees the old laboratory … and Igor’s grandson Igor (“pronounced Eye-gore”, played by Feldman) … and the mysterious Frau Blucher (Leachman). Before long, he’s the spitting image of Victor, down to the ranting and yelling.
The film has some of Brooks’s best gags. The most famous and recurring is probably “walk this way”, which inspired a famous (and breakthrough) Aerosmith song.
Special attention should be paid to the look of the film. Originally at Columbia Pictures, producer Michael Gruskoff negotiated a deal at Twentieth Century Fox when Brooks told him it was impossible to make the film at Columbia’s budget cap. This meant Brooks could use Fox’s elaborate gothic sets. They include Ken Strickfadden’s electrical machines from James Whale’s 1931 film Frankenstein. (One of Strickfadden’s machines—possibly in this film—was used on KISS’s 1976 tour a few years later.) The production team also held firm on the aesthetic decision to shoot in black and white. Cinematographer Gerald Hirschfeld rose to a challenge: Shoot a film that is both a gothic horror film and a comedy, and shoot it in black and white. He managed to capture the high contrast chiaroscuro lighting of the films they were spoofing. Backgrounds are dark (commensurate with the horror’s “darkness”), and closeups are light (commiserate with the comedy’s “lightness”), illuminating the facial expressions.
The overrated, odd final scenes are reasons Young Frankenstein isn’t quite the equal of Brooks’s top achievements. Brooks wanted to cut a strange, lumbering, awkward scene with Frankenstein and the monster (generally masterfully played by Peter Boyle) singing “Puttin’ on the Ritz” on a theater stage. Wilder adamantly argued about it, and Brooks relented. Another bizarre scene shows Frankenstein’s fiancee (Kahn) sending up Elsa Lanchester from The Bride of Frankenstein after what is essentially a sexual assault from the monster. Kahn is better in the other films in this collection. The end is partly redeemed by a moving, plangent monologue by Boyle capsulizing the film’s theme. It’s slightly clichéd, but as a doctor once told me, “That’s why they’re cliches; they’re true!”
Young Frankenstein is by far the most extensive DVD in this set, with Blazing Saddles a distant second and Robin Hood: Men in Tights a distant third. It has an audio commentary by Brooks, a documentary, extensive deleted scenes, and extensive production stills. (The other five are essentially limited to trailers.)
While Young Frankenstein is not (quite) Brooks’s greatest, it is a treasure, and it’s rightfully iconic.
The Mel Brooks Collection (Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment 8DVD, 2006)
All films directed by Mel Brooks except To Be or Not to Be directed by Alan Johnson
All films released through Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation except Blazing Saddles (Warner Bros. Pictures) and The Twelve Chairs [Universal Marion Corporation (UMC)]
All films in color except Young Frankenstein
Blazing Saddles
Story by Andrew Bergman
Screenplay by Mel Brooks, Norman Steinberg, Andrew Bergman, Richard Pryor, and Alan Uger
Produced by Michael Hertzberg
Starring Cleavon Little, Gene Wilder, and Slim Pickens
1974
93 minutes
Rated R
High Anxiety
Written by Mel Brooks, Ron Clark, Rudy DeLuca, and Barry Levinson
Produced by Mel Brooks
Starring Mel Brooks, Madeline Kahn, and Cloris Leachman
1977
94 minutes
Rated PG
History of the World: Part I
Written and Produced by Mel Brooks
Starring Mel Brooks, Dom DeLuise, and Madeline Kahn
1981
92 minutes
Rated R
Robin Hood: Men in Tights
Story by J. David Shapiro & Evan Chandler
Screenplay by Mel Brooks & Evan Chandler & J. David Shapiro
Produced by Mel Brooks
Starring Cary Elwes, Richard Lewis, and Roger Rees
1993
104 minutes
Rated PG-13
Silent Movie
Story by Ron Clark
Screenplay by Mel Brooks, Ron Clark, Rudy DeLuca, and Barry Levinson
Produced by Michael Hertzberg
Starring Mel Brooks, Marty Feldman, and Dom DeLuise
1976
87 minutes
Rated PG
The Twelve Chairs
Screenplay by Mel Brooks based on the novel by Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, translation Diamonds to Sit On by Elizabeth Hill
Produced by Michael Hertzberg
Starring Ron Moody, Frank Langella, and Dom DeLuise
1970
93 minutes
Rated G (Originally rated GP)
To Be or Not to Be
Screenplay by Thomas Meehan & Ronny Graham
Produced by Mel Brooks
Starring Mel Brooks, Anne Bancroft, and Tim Matheson
1983
107 minutes
Rated PG
Young Frankenstein
Screen story and screenplay by Gene Wilder and Mel Brooks, based on characters from the novel Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Produced by Michael Gruskoff
Starring Gene Wilder, Peter Boyle, and Marty Feldman
1974
102 minutes
Rated PG
Also of note:
To Be or Not to Be
Screenplay by Edwin Justus Mayer, from an original story by Melchior Lengyel
Produced and directed by Ernst Lubitsch
Starring Carole Lombard, Jack Benny, and Robert Stack
United Artists Corporation
1942
99 minutes
Son of Frankenstein
Screenplay by Willis Cooper, suggested by the story written by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in 1816
Produced and directed by Rowland V. Lee
Starring Boris Karloff, Basil Rathbone, and Bela Lugosi
Universal Pictures
1939
99 minutes
Postscript: I highly recommend purchasing the tangible box for several reasons. The special features are treasures absent from streaming sessions. At some point, these politically incorrect, bold, brash films may be edited by the studio gatekeepers. In a literally Orwellian culture in which, e.g., “public health” authorities have changed the definition of “herd immunity” to require a vaccine, it is not outlandish to consider the possibility. Who knows when Amazon will drop the collection because one of the films has been “canceled”? Given the ongoing retail apocalypse, where else will you be able to look?
Vile, vicious ideas and the absence of special features are hardly the only reason to invest in the set. There is also the Peter principle. At least one insider has told me that “special editions” authorized by the young dilettantes in charge of such reissues have turned out increasingly diluted, poorly mastered, even bowdlerized edits, some of which have the wrong shots and washed out colors, in the years since the release of The Mel Brooks Collection.
While Mel Brooks is thankfully alive and well, he is a man of a departed cultural milieu, one that was not fundamentally different but significantly less far along in the destruction process.
Enjoy his work while you can.
With two exceptions I have found Mel Brooks to be only moderately amusing. But those two exceptions, "Blazing Saddles", and "Young Frankenstein" are good enough for Brooks to merit the accolades you have given him - especially "Blazing Saddles". As I was watching "Blazing Saddles" for the first time I couldn't believe his characters were saying the things they were saying, all while laughing myself to tears. It remains the greatest send-up of both racists and puritanical authoritarians I have ever seen. And it is exactly how I view most of today's political and intellectual leaders. Thanks!