Priceless. That’s all I got to say. We open with a nice Western ballad, followed by the craziest Western film ever made. Basically, Attorney General Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman) wants to destroy a small town named Rock Ridge. To get the town out of his way, he decides to appoint a black sheriff to said town because people would chase him out (it was 1874) because they’d be offended by him. So he sends Bart (Cleavon Little) a railroad worker he decided not to have hung in order to achieve this. Bart’s rejected by the town as Lemarr and Governor Le Petomane (Mel Brooks) predicted, but after Bart meets the “Waco Kid,” (Gene Wilder) they work together to get the townsfolk (aka, the Johnson family) to save the town in one of the most wild, wildly hilarious, high flying ist, rootin-tootin Westerns ever made, thanks to Mel Brooks’ sense of humor, turning the genre on its head like he would with sci-fi in Spaceballs 13 years later, and of course, breaking the fourth wall, a part of which brings up my only problem I can’t discuss without spoilers. Bart and “Waco Kid” prove to be a dynamic duo who clearly don’t take anything seriously in this unserious world they create. Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder make for hilarious comedy that doesn’t even have to play the race card (much). They do their bits and become best friends in a semi-believable manner in this fast paced comedy that doesn’t need to be perfectly coherent. The soundtrack also sets the hilarious mood with John Morris’ zippy tunes that stay true to the Western genre. The humor was highly controversial in theory, but hilarious in practice. Don’t try these words at home or out in the streets, or anywhere except if you’re watching this movie and are saying it in anticipation of hearing the line. If you take out the offensive stuff, you won’t have a movie, this stuff is comedy gold. It’s meant to be offensive, it’s to make fun of how brutal the Wild West really was, and how it was glorified in Westerns of old. So heads up: there are a lot of slurs and a few swears here and there, so you probably didn’t come across this channel surfing, or if you did, then the point was lost. Anyway, Blazing Saddles, hilarious comedy, check it out, now if you’ll excuse me, I got a review to read within this review.
