Blazing Saddles

Mel Brooks' laugh-packed saga of how the West was definitely not won. The railroad's bound to run right through the sleepy town of Rock Ridge. Land there will be worth a fortune. Only trouble is, the folks in Rock Ridge already own all their land. How do you drive them out? Send in a gang of the roughest, toughest, leanest, meanest men you've got... and appoint a new sheriff you figure will last about 24 hours. But that's not really the plot of Blazing Saddles. That's just the pretext. Once Mel Brooks' lunatic film is under way, logic is lost in a blizzard of gags, jokes, quips, puns, howlers, growlers, and outrageous assaults upon good taste - or any taste at all. Mel Brooks has had his fans rolling in the aisles for more than twenty years. His early writing work on Sid Caesar's "Your Show of Shows," his pioneering 2000-Year-Old Man LP improvised with Carl Reiner, and his irreverent narration for an abstract short film called The Critic all helped build Brooks' underground reputation as a master of off-the-wall comedy. Then came his first hit The Producers (1968), proof that Mel Brooks wasn't just off the wall - he'd blown the walls out and found a new place altogether. Young Frankenstein (1975) and Silent Movie (1976) explored his talents and expanded his audience further. But Blazing Saddles is his masterpiece. It's also the funniest Western ever made. Cleavon Little plays the new Sheriff of Rock Ridge, the perfect frontier lawman - with one minor flaw. Gene Wilder is superb as the smiling, soft-spoken Waco Kid. Mel Brooks steps out of his director's role to play a lecherous, dim-witted politician. And Madeline Kahn, as Lili Von Shtupp, does a broad send-up of Marlene Dietrich that earned her a 1974 Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. With a mind-boggling brawl that spills off the set into a neighboring soundstage, Blazing Saddles goes out in a blaze of glory. Somehow, the Old West will never be the same.