Reconstruction Deconstruction
(originally posted on IMDb 30 August 2018)

I'm not alone in considering "Blazing Saddles" among the trifecta of Mel Brooks's best comedies, along with two of his other early efforts, "The Producers" (1967) and "Young Frankenstein" (1974). Each one is well conceived beyond the jokes themselves, which have always tended to be hit and miss and often immature. I guess you either find flatulence funny or you don't. Regardless, the humor is rapid fire, so a miss here and there isn't much of a problem when they're quickly replaced with gags that do work. "The Producers" has the play-within-the-play and the Jewish mockery of Hitler, following in the footsteps of Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" (1940) and the also-Jewish Ernst Lubitsch's "To Be or Not to Be" (1942), which Brooks as producer remade. "Young Frankenstein," which I also recently reviewed, doesn't have the satirical punch of the other two, but I think, with co-writer Gene Wilder, it's their most-organized and best-looking parody--largely because they adopt the episodes and style from the classic Universal Frankenstein films, which makes it more of an homage than is "Blazing Saddles," which savagely ridicules the prevalent racism of that staple genre of classic Hollywood cinema, the Western, and by extension, American history.

It's the politically-incorrect jokes and the profane use of racial slurs that gets this point across, from inserting a black sheriff in a Reconstruction-era Western settlement. Less attention is given to the Chinese and Irish railroad workers and Indians, but they're in the same boat. Plus, the Yiddish-speaking impersonation of a Native American by Brooks is an ingenious mockery of the tradition of white actors playing racist Indian stereotypes in Hollywood Westerns. I'm not so fond of the gay jokes, including the musical routine of a director and an entire cast of effeminate male stereotypes, as they seem to come off more at the expense of homosexuals, but this was 1974, and I'm not about to feign offense when the film's object is to expose offenses by being itself offensive, and, in the spirit of the Western, there are generally casualties along the route.

The parody of Western tropes is quite effective, too. The romanticism of the railroad, that frontier spirit of Manifest Destiny and those supposed great white men leading the way are pillaged. Hangings, inexplicable quicksand traps, the giant oaf, who ridiculously knocks out a horse here, the gibberish-speaking townsman, the bible-thumping priest and, of course, an absurd brawl that consumes entire groups until there are no bystanders--all movie conventions hilariously made fun of here. There's also Wilder playing the hackneyed drunken gunslinger, as though he were impersonating Dean Martin in "Rio Bravo" (1959), or countless other characters from the genre. Madeline Kahn, in an Oscar-nominated performance, is fabulous in her lisping burlesque of Marlene Dietrich, such as her role in "Destry Rides Again" (1939).

To top off its parody and satirical deconstruction of the Reconstruction-era Western, the town and its populace are literally reconstructed as a ruse for the baddies and, consequently, exposing the film's very own artifice. The ensuing brawl, then, escalates, reductio ad absurdum, to the self-reflexive deconstruction of this very film itself. First, it does so by spilling over its own boundaries into the set of another movie of a different genre, the musical, and, second, to other parts of the studio, including a pie fight in its cafeteria. Then, it becomes the ultimate mise-en-abyme, as the characters attend a screening of this very film at Grauman's Chinese Theatre. This is one of the all-time great endings.