David Vining's Blog, page 135

To Be or Not to Be (1983)

This is one of those movies I grew up with, it having been a key cornerstone of my father’s small VHS collection. This is probably the Mel Brooks movie I’ve seen the most, and like many films from my childhood, I haven’t seen it in years. The movie was instantly recognizable and new all at once, and while it is a remake of an Ernst Lubitsch film of the same name from 1942 (a film I’ve seen once many moons ago and remember little of), I’ve always seen it as its own creation. It’s also the one...

History of the World: Part I

Mel Brooks just finally embraces the sketch comedy format in film after edging closer and closer to it over the previous few movies. It’s also the first film where Brooks was his own boss as the owner of the production company Brooksfilms, and I wonder if Brooks is one of those talents who really needs a counterbalance like Gene Wilder to make things work. It’s the first film of his since The Twelve Chairs where he has sole writing credit. I bring this all up because History of the World: Pa...

High Anxiety

I think it’s pretty obvious that Mel Brooks loved the work of Alfred Hitchcock. I do not think he really understood it, though. I disagree with some contemporary reviewers who said that it was simply impossible to satirize or make a parody of Hitchcock films because of their self-aware senses of humor (which they generally do have). I think Brooks simply made a fairly unfunny film that also would happen to have been a mundane Hitchcock film if he had made it. There’s plenty of stuff to poke ...

Silent Movie

I see this described as a parody of silent comedies, and it’s not. It’s…just a silent comedy. I’m not sure how you parody comedies, but I don’t think it ends up being just another example of the genre. Without getting into the sheer levels of chaotic anarchy of Blazing Saddles or the emotional pathos of The Producers, Mel Brooks made a consistently funny comedy, probably the straightest comedy of his career up to this point. It never reaches the heights of his previous work, but it is defini...

Young Frankenstein

Gene Wilder shared the idea for this film with Mel Brooks while they were making Blazing Saddles together. Brooks loved the idea of the grandson of the famous Victor Frankenstein wanting nothing to do with the family of kooks he came from finding his way into the family business, and a comedy classic was born. A film that feels visually like it could fit in with the classic Universal monster movies (though made by Fox a few decades after the height of that era), Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstei...

Blazing Saddles

This movie was simply too successful financially for Mel Brooks’ career to go in any other direction. His genre parody of westerns, mixed with a comedic takedown of racist attitudes, was a box office success and eventually became a cultural touchstone at levels his previous two films could never dream of reaching. Gone are the funny but sad tales of human struggles, replaced by almost pure comedic chaos. I can’t really complain since I do enjoy the results.

One of the early interesting th...

The Twelve Chairs

There’s an alternate reality where Mel Brooks never made Blazing Saddles, where The Twelve Chairs was successful enough financially and critically where he ended up making comedies with melancholic cores to them for the rest of his career. I’d actually be really interested to see his output had that happened, because I think that The Twelve Chairs is the unsung hero of his entire body of work. Intelligent, tender, sad, and often very funny, it’s a surprisingly moving comedy of a man’s comple...

The Producers

Going from John Ford’s final movie, starring Anne Bancroft, to the first film of Anne Bancroft’s husband, Mel Brooks. It makes sense. Trust me.

Using his connections he had made while working on the Sid Caesar led Your Show of Shows, Mel Brooks found a way to take his perennial joke of a project titled “Springtime for Hitler” and turn it into a movie when he convinced producer Sidney Glazier to raise the $600,000 necessary for production. Hiring noted Broadway actor Zero Mostel and the up...

John Ford: The Definitive Ranking

The largest body of work I’ve done so far, John Ford’s filmography spans nearly fifty years. Also, nearly a third of the entire output is considered lost, mostly films from the 1910s and 1920s. I would have watched them too if they still existed.

What’s remarkable about Ford’s work is twofold. First is the sheer number of films. It’s not the largest body of work from a director I know of (Michael Curtiz has about 180 credits to Ford’s 147), but it still comes out to about three films ...

7 Women

John Ford ended his narrative feature filmmaking career with something different, a story about women instead of men. It’s a bit of a mixed bag of a film, showing a lot of the errant storytelling that had become more prevalent of Ford’s film in his final decade, but a surprisingly stark ending helps elevate the material in a way that I had not been expecting. Reminding me of how Hitchcock went out with Family Plot, a smaller, lesser film that still managed to entertain while also demonstrati...