Blazing Saddles

A corrupt Attorney General appoints a black sheriff to a small town in an effort to drive the residents away.

Blazing Saddles is perhaps Mel Brooks’s finest movie. Brooks, who directed, co-wrote, and starred, delivers a movie that is simultaneously both a wild satire and a homage to the Western genre. Additionally, Blazing Saddles takes the satire angle one step further by poking fun at the Hollywood system itself with it’s inspired ending.

Brooks the director really steps up here. Blazing Saddles feels like a Western, and while a large part of the credit for this goes to the production designer, Brooks also deserves credit for using the same wide shots and dramatic close-ups that the genre is known for, thereby allowing the film to work as a homage in addition to a satire.

While the casting is perfect—Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder make a great on-screen duo and Harvey Korman steals all of his scenes—the real strength here is the script. Just silly enough to maintain the perfect tone, the script is a masterpiece of wordplay. The emphasis on clever dialog and character exaggeration over sight gags is what makes Blazing Saddles special, a point that would be lost on Brooks in his later films.

Granted, Blazing Saddles is not perfect. Some of the gags fall flat, and others lose much of their charm on repeat viewings, but thankfully those are the exception and not the rule.