Friday Feeling: Blazing Saddles
Friday, January 9th, 2009
One to watch over on the terrestrial channels this weekend is Mel Brooks’ satirical send up of the Western genre Blazing Saddles over on Five at 10:45pm this Sunday.
Though the film principally pokes fun at the classic High Noon in terms of music, costumes and set design, Blazing Saddles is a send up of pretty much every Western film ever made, and makes several jokes at the expense of Hollywood itself. Gene Wilder’s character Jim ‘The Waco Kid’, boasts that he’s “killed more men than Cecil B. DeMille,” and villain of the piece General Hedley Lamarr is a pun on actress Hedy Lamarr, who actually threatened to sue - ingeniously, the film makes fun of this with one character telling the General “What the hell are you worried about? This is 1874, you’ll be able to sue her!”
The film also ‘tippenz die hut’ to the Brooks’ Nazi-themed musical send up The Producers by using the theme for the fictional show ‘Springtime for Hitler’ and, loosely, through the name of Madeline Kahn’s character Lili Von Shtupp - ‘Shtup’ is apparently Yiddish slang for doing the nasty, as in the ‘you had to shtup every little old lady in town’ bit from The Producers.
Blazing Saddles is also notable in that it is the first film to feature the sound of someone farting, which I guess has to count for something.
Throughout the film, horses get punched out, religious groups are openly mocked, and a certain racial slur is used repeatedly throughout (17 times by our count). Films referencing rape, murder, arson and rape usually aren’t very funny. This one is. Politically cor-what?
Blazing Saddles airs at 10:45pm this Sunday on Five - available on Freeview, Sky, Virgin and on practically every TV format everywhere.
