Blazing Saddles (1974)
Directed by Mel Brooks
Crafty railroad worker Bart becomes the first Black sheriff of Rock Ridge, a frontier town about to be destroyed in order to make way for a new railroad. Initially, the citizens of Rock Ridge harbor a racial bias toward their new protector. However, they warm to him after realizing that Bart and his perpetually drunk gunfighter friend Jim are their only defense against a wave of thugs sent to rid the town of its population.
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5 films that influenced Blazing Saddles
What critics say influenced Blazing Saddles
Shaft and Super Fly had kicked off the “blaxpoitation” movement in 1971 and 1972, respectively — but those films were geared primarily to a black audience (and they certainly found one).
They loaded their pockets with fist-sized handfuls of John Ford oaters, 1939's Destry Rides Again, and The Magnificent Seven, smooshing them together with the anti-authoritarian zing of the best Marx Brothers comedies.
So Blazing Saddles is funny, yet in another way it’s quite serious – especially if you place the movie in context with the blaxploitation genre, which by 1974 had recently peaked with the likes of Shaft , Super Fly and Black Caesar .
On the American Film Institute's list of the "100 Funniest American Movies of All Time," it ranks #11, near two other team-ups between director Mel Brooks and actor Gene Wilder, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein .
Auspicious debut of comedy god Mel Brooks (six years before he'd unleash both Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles in the same year), this flick is a textbook example of how 'questionable material' can be mined for laughs acutely and effectively � all you need is four or five hilariously gifted filmmakers.
Just as he demonstrated later in Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles , Brooks goes just about anywhere to get a laugh.
In Brooks' next film, " Blazing Saddles " (1974), he produced the famous campfire scene, long before Eddie Murphy's Klumps had their troubles with intestinal gas.
In 1972, Brooks was a Catskills comic-turned-writer-turned-director whose only two films, The Producers and The Twelve Chairs, had not generated promising commercial success.
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In 1972, Brooks was a Catskills comic-turned-writer-turned-director whose only two films, The Producers and The Twelve Chairs, had not generated promising commercial success.
After a successful stint as a television comedy writer, Brooks made "The Producers" in 1968, a modest success that later became a cult classic, followed by "The Twelve Chairs" in 1970, a funny picture that was largely ignored by the public and critics alike.
Brooks was in a career funk; though he’d won the Oscar for The Producers, that award hadn’t translated to box office, and his follow-up The Twelve Chairs had flopped badly.
Brooks' " The Twelve Chairs ," not as funny, still had such great scenes as Brooks himself as an obsequious serf clinging to his master's leg.