On B List of Movie Reviews
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Blazing Saddles (1974)
Rate:
4
Viewed:
2/24
2/24:
After seeing a couple of Mel Brooks films recently, I thought I would check out Blazing Saddles for the first time.
So, they made a comedy that's based on racism? Um, okay...bad taste. Every time somebody says the word "nigger," it feels like it was done
for shock value. I would've understood if it was about a black man getting skewered by the whites before hitting back at them
in the long run, but it didn't work out that way. Instead, Blazing Saddles per se got trashed when the characters came out of
the actual production into the real world which quickly told me that I had wasted my time on the movie.
If anything, it's the writing that stands out. Parts here and there are ingenious, but I hardly laughed. There are plenty of
dated references to Hollywood and others like Howard Johnson's (I was like "Gee...what the hell happened to it?"). It's
hard to believe the film was a huge box-office hit back then, but I wonder what percentage of the ticket buyers were black.
Luckily, Mel Brooks would redeem himself by producing Young Frankenstein and
Silent Movie.
All in all, Blazing Saddles has made Mel Brooks look very bad on top of playing a Yiddish-speaking American Indian.