Mel Brooks (b.1926) an erstwhile nightclub comedian who ventured into television writing, where he would cut his teeth on several series, one of which was all but instantaneously a classic - Get Smart. In 1967 he burst on to the movie scene as the writer/director of the delectably tasteless The Producers which starred both Gene Wilder and powerhouse of powerhouses, Zero Mostel as a pair of shyster entrepreneurs/theater impresarios who attempt to swindle their prospective investors (chiefly affluent and lonely old ladies) by producing a sure-fire disaster, Springtime For Hitler. And though the film was initially panned during its release by hyper-sensitive American critics, the film would become a cult favorite. Brooks then took a stab at straight literary adaptations. The Twelve Chairs (1970), adapted from a classic Russian novel, before his return to the rich vein of parody that he had discovered to be tried and true with his opus magnum The Producers, with Blazing Saddles (1974). In Saddles, a meek and mild-mannered African-American sheriff (Cleavon Little) and a highly neurotic former gunfighter and scotch-swiller, portrayed to the nines with eleven o'clock numbers by one Gene Wilder, team together for the sake of saving the sleepy town of Rock Ridge. In addendum to making sport of your standard Western, the film shamelessly satirizes racist attitudes and Hollywood's most unscrupulous way of stereotyping black performers.
The universal success of Blazing Saddles was repeated by Brooks' next film, Young Frankenstein (1974), which remains one of his most stylish and sustained works, an affectionate send-up of 1930s Hollywood horror movies, all replete with arresting black-and-white photography, lavishly lensed by Gerald Hirschfeld. War films, musicals, suspense films and the world of high finance were all masterfully debunked in 1976's Silent Movie and Hitchcock thrillers were shown little mercy in the hilarious feature High Anxiety (1977). Although both films had highly inventive sequences and gags, they were patchy and partly indulgent. An air of desperate self-appraisal has subsequently belied Brooks' sojourn into 1980s cinema, though History of the World - Part One (1981) has its share of moments,1983's To Be or Not to Be (1983) a remake of a 1942 Lubitsch comedy, in which Brooks and his late wife Anne Bancroft took on the roles founded by Jack Benny and Carole Lombard wouldn't exactly be one of his watershed moments.
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| No amount of benzodiazepine is gonna cure that which ails Brooksy (High Anxiety,1977) |
The staple star of various Brooks movies was indubitably Gene Wilder, a gifted comic-actor with an inimitable flair for the absurder aspects of neurotic vulnerability, who has occasionally functioned as writer/director of vehicles for himself.
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| Wile E. Wilder, the Acme product of Brooks' films. |
Brooks has not directed a film since 1995's Dracula Dead And Loving It. though he would both write and produce the 2005 updating of The Producers. He received the esteemed Kennedy Center Honor in 2009 and a BFI fellowship ensued three years ago. On the better side of nonagenarian now- Brooks is showing no signs of it and is keeping as spry as that Frankenstein friend of his (it is actually Frankenstein's monster but who's counting).