Director: Mel Brooks
Cast: Mel Brooks, Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, Harvey Korman
Have I Seen it Before: I have the clearest memory of renting it on VHS at some point in the distant past, but I remember very little about it, and retrospectives on Brooks tend not to dwell on it much at all.
That should probably tell both you and me something.
Did I Like It: On paper, this should be one of the better Brooks satires. Like Young Frankenstein (1974) and Blazing Saddles (1974)*, but unlike Spaceballs (1987), he is lampooning a type of film—the Hitchcock thriller—for which he has genuine affection. Additionally, one watches the cast displayed—especially Kahn, who can make a classic out of an otherwise languid comedy—and is comforted that, at minimum, a good time is about to be had.
And yet the film leaves me somewhat cold. There were chuckles to be had, and Brooks dutifully creates a Hitchcock pastiche that is silly enough to accomplish what it set out to do. Maybe it is that the film owes more to Vertigo (1958) than any other film in the Hitchcock library. Had it been more North by Northwest (1959) or Psycho (1960) (and there are certainly bits of both films present), I might be more inclined to get behind the film. There’s also the guilless ambition of Brooks, present in all of his work and only in more recent years came to fruition, to be a creature of Broadway. When Brooks breaks out into song, I somehow doubt that he objected as much as legends has it to the “Puttin’ on the Ritz” number in Frankenstein.
And that may be the real problem, which I alluded to in The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975). Come to think of it, these two films might yet be closely related. Most of the ingredients are in both films, but there was something singular in the team up of Brooks and Gene Wilder that inherently diminishes films in which they worked apart.
*No one can take 1974 away from Brooks.