"You'd Do it For Randolph Scott!"
Before it was Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks pitched the title Purple Sage. Derived from the five-time adopted 1912 novel Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey, Brooks hoped the title could be repurposed as a double reference to his own lead character, Sheriff Bart (Cleavon Little), whose dark skin and uncommon wisdom lay the groundwork for a satire on Hollywood capitalism, systemic racial prejudice - and the Western genre that sometimes provides cover to both.
But first it was Tex X. Andrew Bergman’s original spec script slapped on the cheeky but overly ambitious homage of a title to Malcolm X, imagining its fish-out-of-water hero as the center of an anachronistic concept as simply explained as “1974 in 1874.” That was all well and good, but it wasn’t until producer Michael Hertzberg brought on Brooks that the film’s notorious cavalcade of chaotic fourth-wall breaking really started to emerge. The film’s final title, a purposefully nonsensical one that is only meant to haptically reference the genre upon which it plays, is a mini word salad that immediately sets up the film as a zany deconstruction of Western tropes. When Brooks brought the title idea to his wife, the enigmatic actor Anne Bancroft, she exclaimed, “it makes no sense!” And, of course, that’s the point.
Modeling the writing room of Blazing Saddles in the same fashion as the infamous sketch show Your Show of Shows (1950-1955), at which he met his best friend and the late legend Carl Reiner, Brooks brought in the then relatively unknown stand-up Richard Pryor and two freshman writers, Norman Steinberg and Alan Uger. A room of Jews and a Black comic to re-shape a Blaxploitation Western as a Blaxploitation Borscht Belt yiddishe spoof. Like the saga of the film’s name, Blazing Saddles thrives as a film in conversation with the lineage of tropes it seeks to acknowledge, and from which it necessarily departs. There is perhaps no better indication of the seriousness of his endeavor than the original offer that Brooks apparently made to John Wayne for the role of the Waco Kid over a commissary meal (though he loved the script, Wayne turned it down, fearing his fan base would not accept his presence in such a vulgar parody). Brooks then turned to Gig Young, whose eternally cherubic yet aging face had provided for a metric ton of mileage in Sydney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? in 1969. But Young was an alcoholic, and could not get past the first day of shooting without spewing green vomit over his jail cell set. Method acting this was not, though one of Wilder’s more memorable inflections as the Kid is in how he guzzles whiskey like a baby sucking down milk from a bottle.
Brooks and company exploit a remarkably pared-down canvas to utilize a dastardly anarchic paint job. The plot is as simple and as Western as white bread and baked beans, the kind that ignites the film’s infamous crescendoing fart symphony. As Blazing Saddles opens with a thrilling earworm of a title song by Frankie Laine, whose career was made famous as the singer of “Rawhide,” Blazing Saddles announces itself with whip crack sound effects and a rustic title font across a backdrop of arid mountains and plains, keeping with the style of post World War II Westerns it clearly satirizes. The lyrics promise the arrival of a hero who will take care of “bad men near and far,” but more interestingly here, to “conquer” fear and hate.
The film itself takes place about a decade after the emancipation proclamation in an unnamed expanse of desert. With a gliding crane shot over a stretch of laid train tracks, Joseph F. Boric captures a landscape so familiar to the American west, you might think this is Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns (1957), for which he also provided cinematography. Migrant workers are in the midst of sweating over their hoisted pickaxes, berated by Lyle (Burton Gilliam), a bright red-shirt clad lackey, who insists a fainting Chinese worker should be docked a day’s pay for “napping on the job.” Despicably cruel yet cruelly hilarious, so begins the film.
It is revealed that Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman), a robber baron employed by the Governor William J. Le Petomane (Brooks), must go through the small and tranquil town of Rock Ridge in order to complete his railroad project. Hedy Lamarr, the real life celebrity of Hollywood’s golden age, sued Brooks for the unsanctioned use of her name, and it seems Brooks and company only invoked her for the running joke that everyone calls Hedley, Hedy. Regardless of his name’s spelling or pronunciation, this Lamarr is keen to finish his railroad project for the simple desire to earn a buck. He hires Taggart (Slim Pickens), to bring his gang through town on a mission of murder, pillaging and rape. Like Stanley Kubrick did in Dr. Strangelove (1964), Brooks employs Slim Pickens by turning his frequent presence in Westerns and his popular perception as a ruthless hired hand on its head, as the rotund teddy bear plays here something more closely resembling an enthusiastic moron.
Taggart and company kill the sheriff, which leads the town full of White men named Johnson to petition the mayor for a new sheriff - which Lamarr uses as an excuse to scare everyone away with the only type of person they’d find too repulsive to stomach: a Black man. Enter Cleavon Little as Bart, whose obvious advantage as a far more intelligent human (and with remarkable pantomiming skills) keeps him alive. Little is unceasingly charming, his wide smile, impossibly white teeth and honeyed voice making him difficult to dislike. With the help of Jim, formerly known as the Waco Kid (Wilder), Bart helps to defeat the rising tide of unchecked, racialized capitalism by invoking the one weapon which defeats all: community solidarity.
And yet, that plot hardly matters. Brooks’s most cogent film and maybe his most hilarious to boot, Blazing Saddles is a consistent, unceasing play of promiscuity. The film has become the poster child for meaningless arguments against political progress. When people suggest the film “couldn’t be made today,” they may have a point - but not because Blazing Saddles is offensive, or, (to use that diminutive and overused nothingness moniker) “problematic,” but rather because its biting comedy is uncommonly righteous. From its opening scene, in which scores of Chinese and Black migrant workers slave away on railroad construction, Brooks, Pryor et al present othered people as coy, smart and subversive, as when the crew sing Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You” from the suggestion that they should be happy with their labor, a sequence which sees them cooing racists into self-humiliation. When Brooks’s permanently cross-eyed, pantless and drunk Le Petomane is introduced, a massive, smoking cigar perched on his lips like something out of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, he pleads to his aides that “we’ve gotta protect our phony baloney jobs,” and then suggests handing out paddle ball toys “in lieu of pay.” Le Petomane is deliriously uncorked, but underneath that is the depiction of a legislature that cheats its own people out of money and eagerly rushes into the destruction of a town for capital gain. The mayor is only amenable to the suggestion that a Black mayor get hired when Lamarr manipulates him into thinking he could be thought of in the annals of history alongside Abraham Lincoln, an absurd proposal that suggests sometimes our outward facing shows of progress are merely opportunistic flights of fancy.
Even the underdog is skewered. Victims though they may be, and as evidenced by their ridiculously uniformed names, the residents of Rock Ridge are the epitome of small-town American isolation and homogeneity. Their communal peace is only possible via deliberate eschewing of new ideas and new faces. One of the funnier runners is a constant built-in censorship of derogatory words via formal trickery, making them land with a thump when they are fully said, and heard. The people that wield the many epithets are always racist, always ignorant, never glorified, nor never apologized for. When the town gets together to write a note of “displeasure” at the Mayor’s choice of sheriff, their racist outcry is met with the literal braying of a herd of cows that are, improbably, filtering through the aisles of the town church.
Brooks’s comedy further denigrates the mythic quality of hypermasculinity endemic to the Western. Lamarr’s bizarre and wayward desires are exemplified by his seeming objectum-sexuality, as in his clear erotic interest in a small metallic sculpture and, later, a forest-green rubber ducky over which he panics when he thinks it's lost. Mongo (Alex Karras), a walking boulder of destruction, expresses a “crush” he has on Sheriff Bart after the latter defeats him with a Bugs Bunny style telegram-bomb. When the entire enterprise devolves into an all-out brawl on the back lots of Warner Bros., a cowboy and a gay Busby Berkeley-style dancer immediately fall in love, a literal collision of perceived normativity in sexual and masculine performance. And then there’s Gene Wilder. Whatever Brooks’s initial intentions were in casting the Waco Kid, he eventually had to go with a New York Jew as a mythic icon of the West in league with Clint Eastwood, his clenched and unshaven jaw wistfully reminiscing of quick draws and deaths. A mirror to the writing process behind the scenes, Bart and Jim is a pair of a Black man and a Jew, gleefully poking at and examining a complicated history of racial and religious solidarity.
Between the jabs at racial, sexual and class-based othering, it's easy to forget the utter downpour of anachronisms and Hollywood in-jokes. Amongst them all, Brooks has Count Basie’s band playing Bart’s entrance into Rock Ridge; the Waco Kid’s proclamation that he “must’ve killed more men than Cecil B. DeMille;” Lamarr’s passionate assertion that he is due for an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor (which, sadly, did not come to pass in reality for Korman); Bart running away from danger by doing an “impression” of Jesse Owens; and Madeleine Kahn’s unnervingly stupid and charming performance as Lili Von Shtupp in the song “I’m Tired,” which has clearly been crafted to mock Marlene Dietrich’s in Destry Rides Again (1939) in the vein of the same showstoppers Brooks himself once performed as a young Jew in the Catskills. Jack Starrett, whose whiskey-soaked blathering as Gabby Johnson is labeled as “authentic country gibberish,” is a barely disguised facsimile of early Western mainstay Gabby Hayes, his shaggy and wiry beard as big as his torso. During a languid flashback of Bart’s childhood, Brooks plays a Sioux tribe leader as an Eastern European Jewish immigrant, speaking Yiddish to the indigenous people behind him in allowing a Black family to traverse part of their land. As silly as its presentation is, Brooks seems to purposefully play with the sometimes tricky imbricated relationships of Blacks, Jews and Indigenous peoples. Like he’s done so many times himself, Brooks has Little put on the Klan clothes of his oppressor in one of many steps to ensure his own liberation. But the film is also content to merely poke fun at the genre’s reverence for legends of old; when the people of Rock Ridge initially object to banding together to save their town, Bart convinces them by reminding them that they’d “do it for Randolph Scott,” whose barrage of Western film appearances frequently saw the six foot three stallion saving innocent people from almost certain death. Even the poster’s tagline - “Never Give a Sucker an Even Break” - joyously recalls W.C. Fields’ 1941 metatheatrical comedy, repurposed here for a movie in which othered members of Hollywood fight back through the screen.
All of these references and stretches of the fabric of reality make Blazing Saddles something of a meta-text commentary on Hollywood studio filmmaking writ-large. By situating his parody within the context of the Western, Brooks implicates the entertainment industry in the systemic mistreatment of Black, Jewish, Chinese, Indigenous, Female, Queer, and, as Olson Johnson bitterly, and bitingly admits in the film, “even the Irish.” Given that the film was written at the tail end of the sixties and made in the early part of the seventies, when popular conceptions of American empire and conquest were no longer seen as de rigeur, it becomes hard not to look at Blazing Saddles as a satirical recrimination of audience’s willingness to see Westerns as apologia for imperial destruction and incursion into the land. Of course in the end, Blazing Saddles is mostly a fart-filled slapstick comedy, but none of it would work quite so well without its fortified base of clear-eyed politics and social mores.
Which isn’t to say Blazing Saddles is infallible. Even by the standards of 1974, the film isn’t exactly egalitarian. There are only two women with significant roles in the film, one of whom is a sex-crazed and talentless burlesque performer (stunningly played by Kahn, who was nominated for the Oscar), the other a bleating, racist school marm (Harriett Johnson, as played by Carol Arthur). One of the less savory jokes is the suggestion that Bart’s penis is so large it is enough to justify an oft-repeated and racist stereotype about Black men (though, apparently, the joke was intended as von Shtupp confusing Bart’s genitals for his gun). Though the film does dismantle the uber masculinity of the Western male stereotype, it does so through an instance of gay male stereotyping, portraying its few queer characters as comically effeminate and physically weak.
Still, the film is, on the whole, remarkably progressive, and Brooks has Bart and the Waco Kid fortify the perspective that racism is a tool wielded by idiots with set design. Really. In an attempt to fool Taggart and Lamarr’s roving, traveling circus of Nazis, bandits, fascists, KKK members and more, the two band together the railroad workers with the Rock Ridge residents to build an exact replica of the town. The ensuing brawl results in the destruction of the fake Rock Ridge, and Blazing Saddles explodes into a Hieronymous Bosch level of Earthly chaos. A set within a set is revealed within the playground of Warner Bros., at which Dom DeLuise directs a tap-dancing musical in tails with a legion of gay dancers, as the burgeoning brawl bursts through the cheap cardboard walls. The undying plasticity of Hollywood’s creations extend into a commissary-set food fight where whipped cream pies are tossed by Hitler-costumed background actors. The explosive climax reaches its inevitable conclusion as Bart, the Waco Kid and Hedley all head to the famous Mann’s Chinese Theater in present-day Hollywood to see… Blazing Saddles, where the braying cows from the earlier town hall scene are cordoned off beyond the concession stand in the same manner as would a Batman suit. Such labyrinthine cycles of metatheatrical solipsism are par for the course for Brooks, but rarely has his films had such a mirthful combination of genuine political critique and playful homage. As the Waco Kid leaves his popcorn behind, and the two head off to “nowhere special,” they really just ride their horses to the back of a limo car. One last joke about the true nature of our horse-riding cowboys: they’re just actors, off to the next movie set. So too, was Randolph Scott.
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