Director: Gene Wilder
Cast: Gene Wilder, Madeline Kahn, Marty Feldman, Dom DeLuise
Have I Seen It Before: You know, never. And that automatically feels like some kind of grievous error. Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman, and Madeline Kahn* in a movie together less than a year—indeed, almost exactly a year—after Young Frankenstein (1974)? Where has the movie been my whole life?
Did I Like It: And that might be the—admittedly minor—problem. If it had this much talent behind it, shouldn’t it have been on the collective minds of people who were born after its release much earlier? There’s something here that is less—slightly, but still noticeably less—than the sum of its parts here. Maybe its Wilder as a first time director, able to trade on famous friends to do him a favor, but still lost under the auspices of being an auteur.
It might be unfair to compare this film to Young Frankenstein, but also impossible to completely avoid. I think the real problem might be that in that earlier film—easily my favorite film of Brooks’ library—there was a friction between Brooks and Wilder that made each of them better. They argued like hell over the “Puttin’ on the Ritz Number” in Frankenstein, and it became a delightful moment in a uniformly delightful film. Here, there are just too many whimsical musical numbers to not find them a bit distracting. So, too, Brooks movies never shaped up to be quite as good as they were when they worked together**. It’s more than a little bit fascinating to have a pretty good case study, even if the data is a little incomplete, but is complete with a control and experimental group.
*The single most reliable improver of any movie. Don’t believe me? Take her out of Clue (1985) and see what you have left.
**Yes, I understand that since I was born after 1975, I’m supposed to love Spaceballs (1987), but I just don’t.