All about Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business

by Mel Brooks

Later in life, I could wax eloquently about masterpieces like Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis, Renoir’s Grand Illusion, Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. But to tell the truth, I loved the musicals more than anything else. Shall We Dance, Swing Time, and Top Hat. The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies thrilled me through and through. Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler, Allan Jones, Betty Grable, Alice Faye, and Borrah Minevitch and his Harmonica Rascals. Nearly all of my films have a musical number in tribute to my affection for the great movie musicals of that era. Right on the heels of musicals I loved comedies. Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, Buster Keaton’s The Navigator, and of course the Marx Brothers, the Ritz Brothers, and Laurel

and Hardy. When I was older and more sophisticated there was Ernst Lubitsch’s smart comedies like Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner, and Design for Living, Preston Sturges’s The Palm Beach Story and Sullivan’s Travels, and the foreign comedy masterpieces such as Monicelli’s Big Deal on Madonna Street, and Jacques Tati’s Jour de fête.