Blazing Saddles 4K 1974

Mel Brooks's early films tackle an issue as complex as racial discrimination in America. And 'Blazing Saddles' doesn't just address it, it's based on it. It's not for nothing that every five minutes someone says either 'black' or 'nigger' and things like that. And the great comedy director did not think long before he gave the main character such a skin color and laughed enough at westerns, where such characters appeared very rarely. It is the pale-faced people who look weak in the movie, except for the hero Gene Wilder, who shoots so fast that we do not have time to notice it (this is how Mel Brooks mocks super-fast cowboys with the help of editing).

The main role is played by Cleavon Little, tapes with whose participation to Russia almost never reached Russia. A big, by the way, an omission - he brilliantly played the scene in which he took himself hostage. Also in the picture observed Harvey Korman, Madeline Kahn, Dom deLuise and Mel Brooks himself (such names are listed in the list of actors in half of Brooks' films, and the maestro himself this time also composed the lyrics). So when Lily von Stupp (Madeline Kahn) tries to sing something incomprehensible on stage, he's the one who's doing it, but only for laughs.

Singing the blues instead of 'The Lady from Kentucky', cliché jokes, a kick to all of Hollywoodland in the form of trashing the studio canteen, Indians speaking English, German and Yiddish. An army of evil that includes Nazis, Bedouins, Mexican bandits, Ku Klux Klan members, and a way to fight them (a checkpoint where you have to throw dimes). Oh, how far all this is from the good old western, and yet the canons of the genre are observed: the opening credits with 'country' music and whip whistles, the burning Warner brothers studio screensaver, the sun setting behind the rock in the last frame.

And yet the finale is more than surreal. What happens after the mass brawl begins - this could only come from Mel Brooks. I thought for a long time what the master wanted to say with such a big joke. Probably, it was about the fact that westerns are dying out as a genre, gathering in the seventies only half of the theater halls and appearing in huge numbers, one worse than the other (the era of Sergio Leone has passed). The usual horses are replaced by mechanical, sheriffs have long since been neither elected nor appointed, and the Wild West has ceased to be since Las Vegas and Hollywood appeared in the middle of the desert. And Mel Brooks with his comedy 'Blazing Saddles' said the last 'goodbye' to westerns, as Clint Eastwood and his 'Unforgiven' will do in the nineties.