Film Review - Blazing Saddles

This film presents many anachronistic elements in addition to crude, racist and sexist material lased with toilet humor and foul language all in a very unpolitically correct form during a time when being politically correct probably meant knowing the United States Presidents in order of service

I first saw the movie when I was about 13 years old. I don't know why but I thought it was funny enough to quote on a random basis for the next 2 years. I was cool!!! Go figure. Watching it again gave me a complete sense of disgust. I could not believe that I lived in a society and culture where it would be okay to present a movie like this to audiences, and to think that it was actually “one of Mel Brooks' funniest, most successful and most popular films.” Yeah, it had its funny moments, but mainly the humor was just meant for ridicule.

In today’s society it should be controversial and embarrassing to say the very least. It was apparent to me that the film was made to make fun of racism during a time when blacks were seen as sub-servant to all others. There was not a negative black character in comparison to the indecent, stupid, particularly ridiculous white cast. I was young then but I remember feeling sorry for anyone who was not white because I knew it meant that they were not as good. I imagine that Mel Brooks and Richard Prior sat at lunch and made fun of how ignorant people really are to judge another by the color of their skin, so they decided to write a movie. And good for them, they served up a movie that created controversy then and we are still discussing it.

The form worked for the time it was made and for its purpose. It commanded audiences who had loved westerns for decades. The farcical nature of it was interesting in that they seemed to present polar opposites for that period of time within each character (a black sheriff, a racist town, a sex-obsessed Governor). Maybe the bad humor today is in that all of these are obvious within our humanity, our culture. The ideals that were once are just that…once upon a time…!

Blazing Saddles reeked of bad humanity throughout and made people take a second look at how ridiculous racism is. I don’t think it had much impact because for the time it was made the audiences who would have put much though into really watching it without being offended were probably the people who had the least problems with racism, and they would have laughed their asses off thinking of all the idiots who walk around really acting just that stupid. In actuality it probably had more truth to it then farce; white people can be really indecent, ridiculous and ignorant!