High Anxiety (1977)
Directed by Mel Brooks
A psychiatrist with intense acrophobia (fear of heights) goes to work for a mental institution run by doctors who appear to be crazier than their patients, and have secrets that they are willing to commit murder to keep.
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What critics compared High Anxiety to
“High Anxiety” mocks “The Birds,” “Spellbound, “Psycho” and many other Hitchcock classics, but it’s pure Brooks through and through.
Spellbound and Vertigo are the source of the plot's main inspiration, but North by Northwest, The Birds, Dial M for Murder and many others are also referenced.
Choosing the misbegotten Spellbound, oddly, as its jumping-off point, High Anxiety stars Brooks as acrophobic Dr.
Generally juvenile and crass spoof of Hitchcock thrillers, filching themes and scenes from Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds, Spellbound, etc, in its story of a psychologist going to work at a very strange and sinister Institute for the Very Very Nervous.
Hey, that’s from North by Northwest .
Spellbound and Vertigo are the source of the plot's main inspiration, but North by Northwest, The Birds, Dial M for Murder and many others are also referenced.
It's difficult to satirize an artist--at least in the revue fashion of Mel Brooks--because you're relying on motifs and iconography instead of clichés and conventions, and it's difficult to satirize Hitchcock because he did it himself with North by Northwest , a post-modern send-off for his most formulaic tendencies.
Smartly spoofing scenes from the likes of Psycho, North by Northwest, The Birds and Vertigo, right down to Hitch's famous camera angles, High Anxiety is my personal favorite in the Brooks' canon.
He takes such key Hitchcock moments as the shower scene from " Psycho " (1960), the climbing scene from " Vertigo ", and the shooting in "North by Northwest" and he clobbers them.
Mel Brooks made it look like a higher form, in films such as Silent Movie and High Anxiety, but it's mostly just the pointless expression of obsessive fandom.
Young Frankenstein and High Anxiety could only have come from a hardcore cinephile who'd logged time obsessing over Universal horror movies and Alfred Hitchcock thrillers, frame by frame.
The titular asylum for the criminally insane, first glimpsed through the Boston Harbor fog like a remembrance of King Kong, is described as a fusion of "moral order and clinical care"; unfortunately, the humorless fortissimo approach here makes it less emotionally resonant or artistically coherent than Mel Brooks "Institute for the Very, Very Nervous" in High Anxiety.
Brooks was out for laughs with his Hitchcock riff High Anxiety; Scorsese is painfully serious with his own Hitchcock man-crush.
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Mel Brooks perfected the form in the '70s with pictures like High Anxiety (a Hitchcock spoof), Silent Movie (silent era spoof), and Young Frankenstein (figure it out for yourself).
His “Young Frankenstein” charmingly skewered old-school horror tropes, while “High Anxiety” affectionately lampooned Hitchcock.
“If you’re loud and annoying,” Mel Brooks informed Madeline Kahn in High Anxiety , “psychologically, people don’t notice you.”
Had Mel Brooks not used “High Anxiety” as a title, you sense Scorsese would have grabbed it.
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It took a team of three writer/directors (Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker) to run with the comic baton that Mel Brooks temporarily passed along after “High Anxiety.”