This article was originally written about programming in the TCM Now Playing newsletter in October 2021.
Although his remarkable career spans from his earliest days as a TV comedy writer in the late 1940s to appearances in movies scheduled to be released in 2022, Mel Brooks is probably best known for writing and directing a string of features that dominated the film comedy landscape in the 1970s. He launched himself on the big screen as a creator of outrageous farce with The Producers (1967) and The Twelve Chairs (1970) before turning to hilariously knowing satires that lovingly skewered classic Hollywood films, genres and personalities.
In that direction, he has taken on silent movies (Silent Movie, 1976), historical epics (History of the World: Part I, 1981), sci-fi (Spaceballs, 1987) and horror (Dracula: Dead and Loving It, 1995). He slaughters some other sacred cows in the three films in this TCM program, and it’s some of his very best work.
Young Frankenstein (1974), shot in the black-and-white style of the great Universal horror pictures of the 1930s, revisits the classic tale of a mad scientist (Gene Wilder) and his monstrous creation (Peter Boyle) with some truly classic comic set pieces. Brooks lends his voice (uncredited) to certain moments but doesn’t appear on screen, leaving the funny business to Wilder, Boyle and a cast of comedy greats, including Marty Feldman (as henchman Igor), Madeline Kahn, Teri Garr, Gene Hackman and Cloris Leachman as a frightening housekeeper whose name alone strikes fear in horses.
In High Anxiety (1977), Brooks takes on no less than Alfred Hitchcock. Brooks stars as a psychiatrist named Richard Thorndyke with an intense fear of heights, referencing both James Stewart in Vertigo (1958) and Cary Grant in North by Northwest (1959). The familiar Hitchcock tropes are here: the wrongly accused hero, the icy and mysterious blonde (Kahn), the psychiatric institution where the crazies are in charge (including Harvey Korman and Leachman as the wickedly named Nurse Diesel), marauding birds, and even the infamous shower scene.
The Hollywood Western–and its inherent racism and xenophobia–is ripe for parody in Blazing Saddles (1974), in which a dastardly land baron (Korman as Hedley Lamarr) tries to destroy a town by appointing a Black sheriff (Cleavon Little). Wilder returns as a drunken gunslinger (“I must have killed more men than Cecil B. DeMille.”) and Kahn does a dead-on Dietrich impression, circa Destry Rides Again (1939), as saloon singer Lili Von Shtüpp (“Willkommen. Bienvenue. Welcome. C'mon in.”). Brooks even shows up as the dimwitted Governor Lepetomane (after a French entertainer of the early 20th century who could flatulate at will to orchestral tunes).
