1974, 93 minutes
Directed by Mel Brooks
50th ANNIVERSARY
Fresh off The Producers, his biting satirical comedy of Broadway, director Mel Brooks took on the wild west.
Old west cliche bad guy Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman) is determined to take his railroad through the tiny town of Rock Ridge, so he sends his thugs (led by super-character actor Slim Pickens) to threaten the town. When the townsfolk demand the evil Governor give them a new sheriff, he instead hires black rail worker Bart (Cleavon Little) as the sheriff to create racial chaos. But Bart and washed-up sidekick Jim (Gene Wilder) are too modern and smart, so they flip the script on Lamarr, his muse (Madeline Kahn) and the racist townsfolk. Speaking of script, it's co-written by Richard Pryor and attacks the 1870s with a 1970s attitude, ranging from childish crude jokes to genius satirical commentary on race, while consistently destroying the fourth wall between the screen and the audience for laughs.
"The 1974 spin on westerns sees Mel Brooks pointing at the absurdity of racism and the history of human evil while always ensuring a steady stream of laughter... Though it rarely gets mentioned in the same breath as The Wild Bunch, McCabe and Mrs Miller and the wave of revisionist westerns that came out of Hollywood in the late 60s and early 70s, Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles doesn’t need any artfully hazy Vilmos Zsigmond cinematography to upend Old West mythology." - Scott Tobias, The Guardian