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The films of Alfred Hitchcock were such a genre unto themselves that it was probably inevitable that Mel Brooks would have a swing at them and, while Brooks does connect with the ball, this film is anything but a home run. More like a dribbler back to the pitcher.
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[/types] nudity=0 violence=0 language=1 subject=2]As the least well-known of Mel Brooks’s early films, The Twelve Chairs stands well apart from the others. It’s not a spoof of other films nor is it a balls-to-the-wall farce like The Producers. While it has its slapstick elements, it also has a kind of sweetness and elements of character drama not normally found in Brooks’s filmography.
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Apparently, Mel Brooks had run out of movie genres that warranted spoofing in their own movie, so he threw together this occasionally successful hodge-podge of historical epics. This movie probably would have worked better if Brooks had found a few more historical periods to include.
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Following not so hard on the heels of Spaceballs, Robin Hood: Men in Tights marks the second entry in the latter stage of Mel Brooks’ directing career. While not totally lacking in its share of entertainment value, it definitely fails to deliver the subversive zing found in most of the earlier Brooks films like Blazing Saddles or even History of the World, Part I.
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You might call Silent Movie Mel Brooks’ version of Adaptation, since it’s kind of a movie about itself, a silent movie about Mel Brooks making a silent movie.
Of course, there aren’t any real parallels between the two films but how often do you get to compare Mel Brooks to Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze?
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Musicals use their plot as a connector between songs. Porn films used plot, back when they had one, to connect the sex scenes. Similarly, Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles uses what plot it has as a framework upon which to hang a non-stop barrage of sight-gags, puns and just plain jokes, most of them very funny.
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Spaceballs marked the beginning of a second stage to Mel Brooks‘ career. After a busy decade in the 1970s, he had been quiet since 1981’s History of the World, Part I. Unlike his early films, where he satirized broad genres or at least the entire life’s work of a single director, this second wind would find him targeting a single film for parody and, in this case, a full decade after the film in question, Star Wars, was current and considered ripe for the spoofing.
The real weakness of this and later Brooks films is the laziness of the humor. Brooks seems to be weakly emulating the style of Abraham/Zucker films that his early work helped to inspire, such as Airplane!. Continue reading
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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.