February 7, 1974, 50 years ago: Blazing Saddles premieres, director Mel Brooks' tribute to, and parody of, classic Western movies.
Hedley Lamarr (played by Harvey Korman) is a railroad executive, and the Attorney General of an unidentified Western territory of the United States. His name always gets turned into that of Hedy Lamarr, a popular actress of the 1930s and '40s. He gets told, "This is 1874: You can sue her!" He wants to build his railroad through the town of Rock Ridge, but the residents (who all seemed to be named Johnson) won't leave.
So he sends his flunky Taggart (Slim Pickens) and his goons there, to, as Taggart, says, "go ridin' into town, whompin' and a-whompin'," until the terrified citizens leave. But the move backfires: They are willing to fight for their town, and demand that the Territorial Governor, William J. Le Petomane (Brooks) appoint a Sheriff to protect them.
Lamarr figures out a way around this: Since Le Petomane is an idiot, and Lamarr is clearly the power behind the throne, he convinces Le Petomane to appoint a Sheriff that the people of Rock Ridge will never accept: A black man named Bart (Cleavon Little -- the character's last name is never mentioned).
Sure enough, at first, they are repulsed. As Jim (Gene Wilder), a former hired gun known as the Waco Kid, explains: "You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know: Morons." (The ending was an ad-lib by Wilder. Little cracked up, and Brooks left it in, because it was funny. As Brooks has said, "The only true sin is not being funny.")
In a flashback, where Bart tells Jim his backstory, he mentions his family being the only black family in a wagon train, and thus at the back of it, as if it was a segregation-era bus. When they're attacked by Indians, the chief, also played by Brooks, tells his braves to give them a break: "They're even darker than we are!"
Jim helps Bart win the town over. So Lamarr sends in his doomsday weapon: Mongo (former football star Alex Karras), a gigantic man of limited intelligence and words. Lamarr figures Bart wouldn't be able to handle him. As Jim says, when Bart suggests shooting him, "Don't do that. It'll only make him mad!" Well, not only does Bart find a way to handle Mongo, but Mongo defects to Bart's side, respecting him as the only man ever to stand up to him.
This not having worked, Lamarr sends in another secret weapon: Lili von Shtupp, an overtly sexy German singer (Madeline Kahn, in an obvious homage to Marlene Dietrich), who is meant to seduce Bart. But Bart is a lover as well as a fighter, so she defects to his side, too.
So Lamarr decides he needs total war, telling Taggart, "I want you to round up every vicious criminal and gunslinger in the west. Take this down. I want rustlers, cutthroats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados! Mugs, pugs, thugs! Nitwits, halfwits, dimwits! Vipers, snipers! Con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits! Muggers, buggerers! Bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes! Train robbers, bank robbers! Asskickers, shitkickers! And Methodists!"
The final brawl breaks the fourth wall. Well, it breaks a wall, as the fighting Wild Westerners crash through the set of a movie musical, directed by Buddy Bizarre (Dom DeLuise). Then it breaks into the commissary at Warner Brothers' studio. Finally, it spills out onto the streets of Hollywood, where Bart shoots Lamarr in front of the famous Chinese Theatre. Back in 1874, the townspeople thank Bart for his service, and he and Jim start to ride off into the sunset, as Western heroes tend to do. Then they get off their horses and into a limousine, and are driven off into the desert -- possibly to Las Vegas.
Brooks wrote the screenplay with black comedy legend Richard Pryor, who was supposed to play Sheriff Bart. But Pryor's cocaine habit was out of control at the time, and he became unreliable: The insurance company for the film wouldn't insure him. So it became a starmaking role for Little.
Brooks also wrote the songs for the film, including the title song. Thinking of Frankie Laine's singing of the theme to the TV show Rawhide, and his big Western-themed hit song "Mule Train," both with the sound effect of a cracking whip, Brooks placed an ad in the trade paper Variety, calling for "a Frankie Laine type." Laine himself answered the ad. Brooks didn't tell him the film was a comedy, and he sang it absolutely straight, and it's a great performance.
(There was precedent for this: Ten years earlier, Stanley Kubrick directed Dr. Strangelove, and told half the cast that the film was a comedy, and the other half that it was a drama, with equally stunning results.)
The studio had a lot of problems with the film. There was a lot of usage of "The N-word." In a 2012 interview, Brooks said, "If they did a remake of Blazing Saddles today, they would leave out the N-word. And then, you've got no movie." The purpose was to satirize racism, to show how rotten it is, and how stupid it is. And Brooks got support on it from both Pryor and Little.
There were also objections to Karras punching a horse. And to the beans scene. Brooks pointed out that, in pretty much every movie with cowboys in it, they're eating beans, but nobody hears the sounds that result. But Brooks' contract gave him final content control, and he refused to make any substantive changes.
Times change. When the film is shown on TV today, the N-word is blanked out. And there's a scene near the beginning where Taggart accuses some of the rail workers of "jumping around like a bunch of Kansas City faggots!" That word is often called the gay version of the N-word, but the TV version could have used a better rewrite than "a bunch of Kansas City dummies!"
And Kahn's German singer? Her name is Lili von Shtupp. "Schtup" is, basically, "fuck" in Yiddish. So the TV version blanks it out, so it sounds like her name is "Lili von Sh." And yet, her name can be seen on the poster for the concert. But they left in the Indian chief's reaction upon seeing Bart's family, the single word "Schwarzes!" (German, or in Brooks' case, Yiddish, for "Blacks!" In the vampire parody Love at First Bite, George Hamilton's Dracula said it, but, for the TV version, it was replaced with, "Good evening!")
Wilder, who had previously worked with Brooks in The Producers, agreed to be in Blazing Saddles on one condition: He had a special project he wanted to do, and he asked Brooks to direct. So they made that movie next: Young Frankenstein. Brooks has said that Blazing Saddles is his funniest movie, but Young Frankenstein is his best.
In 1995, I had a terrible cold, a cough that lasted for weeks, and kept me up nights. One night, I saw that Blazing Saddles was going to be on TV. I'd never seen it before, so I figured, what the heck. Big mistake: Every time I laughed, I started coughing again. I began to wonder who would die first, me or Hedley Lamarr. (I didn't see Young Frankenstein until 2021. Shame on me for waiting until then to get over the hump.)
Slim Pickens died in 1983, Jack Starrett (Gabby Johnson, a parody of Western actor Gabby Hayes) in 1989, Cleavon Little in 1992, Madeline Kahn in 1999, Richard Pryor in 2005, Frankie Laine in 2007, Harvey Korman in 2008, Dom DeLuise in 2009, Alex Karras in 2012, Gene Wilder and David Huddleston (Olson Johnson) in 2016, and John Hillerman (Howard Johnson) in 2017.
Amazingly, as of February 7, 2023, Mel Brooks is still alive, at age 96. Also of note in the film and still alive on that date are Robyn Hilton, who played Miss Stein, the Governor's top-heavy secretary; and Rodney Allen Rippy, the former hamburger spokeskid who played young Bart, who grew up and left acting for a successful career in marketing.