Films featuring
Gene Wilder

The Frisco Kid

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The Frisco Kid is a genial comedy desperately in search of a narrative thread. This story of a hapless Polish rabbi (Gene Wilder) finding his way across the American Old West with the help of a genial bank robber (Harrison Ford) has a good heart and some funny moments, but no sense of direction. It hits the high points of western clichés, like train robbers, Chinese railroad workers, a hanging posses, horse being spooked by a rattlesnake and a climatic showdown on a dusty street. The real problem is that the central relationship, between Wilder’s Rabbi Avram Belinski and Ford’s Tommy Lillard, has no story arc. They meet, they bicker, they reach San Francisco.

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Young Frankenstein

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Young Frankenstein remains the most consistently self-assured film of Mel Brooks‘ career. Not as audaciously funny as Blazing Saddles or The Producers, it is still a pitch-perfect send up of the Universal monster movies of the 1930s. Filmed entirely in glorious black-and-white, the cinematography sets the perfect mood for lovingly satirizing those classics.

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