Blazing Saddles (1974) Review
9/10
A corrupt state official appoints a Black sheriff to a frontier town, expecting the town to riot and abandon its land so the railroad can come through. The town does riot. The sheriff stays anyway, and proceeds to be the smartest person in every room he enters. The 9 is for a comedy with a working argument underneath it. The premise is a structural joke about the Western, and every gag is bolted to a thesis about who gets to be the hero of that genre and why the answer has always been rigged.
I think this is the smartest comedy Brooks ever made, and it’s angrier than its reputation. Every joke has a target, the target is always the bigot, and I laugh hardest at the moments where Bart makes a fool of a man who thinks he’s the one in charge.
The point I hold is for the last ten minutes, where the film breaks its own frame and stops being about anything. That’s a legitimate choice and Brooks commits to it, and it’s still a step down from what precedes it.
Who Says the Word, and Who Gets the Laugh
The film opens with a railroad foreman demanding a work song from his Black laborers, using the ugliest word in American English while he does it. Brooks was uneasy about the language. Richard Pryor, one of the five credited writers, insisted on it and insisted on the volume.
The reasoning is visible in every scene that follows. The word is always in the mouth of somebody the film despises, and it’s always immediately followed by that person being outmaneuvered. Bart hears it and responds by being cleverer, calmer and better at the job than the man who said it.
So the target is never in doubt. The joke is never on Bart. The joke is on people so stupid that they can’t see they’re being run rings around by the man they’re insulting, and the film gives Cleavon Little every opportunity to show the gap.
Little’s performance is the reason this works. Pryor was considered for the role and would have played it hotter. Little plays Bart cool, amused, always a beat ahead. That lets the film hold its own temper while the townspeople lose theirs.
Offensive language in fiction is a question of who is holding it. Put it in the mouth of a character the text has already indicted and it indicts him further. Put it in the narration and it belongs to you.
The second half of the technique is more important than the first. The insult has to cost the person delivering it something immediately, in the same scene, or the audience has no signal about where the work stands.
Brooks pairs every slur with a defeat. That pattern is established in the first three minutes and never broken. That’s why an audience fifty years later can still tell exactly what the film thinks.
The Sheriff Outthinks Everybody
Bart’s method throughout is intelligence applied to people who have none. He talks himself out of a lynching by taking himself hostage, a gag that works because the townspeople are exactly credulous enough to fall for it and Bart knows it.
That single scene tells you the shape of the film. Bart is never rescued. He’s never taught a lesson by a white character. He solves each problem himself using the town’s own stupidity as his lever, and the film treats his competence as the given, never the surprise.
Gene Wilder’s Waco Kid is the exception and the film is careful about how it uses him. He’s a friend and a drunk with a fast hand, and he’s subordinate to Bart in every scene they share. The white gunslinger is the sidekick. In 1974 that reversal was doing real work.
Harvey Korman and Madeline Kahn play the opposition at exactly the right pitch. Korman’s Hedley Lamarr is vain and petty, a bureaucrat who wants a legacy.
Kahn’s Lili Von Shtupp is a Dietrich parody who ends up on Bart’s side because she has better instincts than her employer. After Little, Kahn is the performer I enjoy most here, and I’d happily have taken twice as much of her.
Korman’s running gag about his own name is the best small joke in the film. He corrects everybody who calls him Hedy, over and over, with mounting fury. Hedy Lamarr sued Warner Bros. over it during production and the studio settled out of court. Brooks found the lawsuit flattering. That’s the correct response to being sued over a pun.
The Anachronisms Are Structural
Set in 1874, the film contains a Count Basie orchestra playing in open desert, a modern traffic jam of studio executives, and characters who refer to the film they’re appearing in. None of that is random. The Western as a genre had spent seventy years pretending to be history while functioning as myth. Brooks keeps puncturing the surface to remind you that what you’re watching is a set, a costume department and a set of conventions somebody chose. Once the audience accepts that the frontier is a studio backlot, the film’s actual argument becomes available. If the West is a fiction, then the whiteness of its heroes was a decision and not a fact, and the film can simply make a different decision. That’s why the anachronisms aren’t merely gags. They dismantle the authority of the genre so the casting can make an argument. A straight Western with a Black sheriff would have to justify itself. This one doesn’t have to, because it’s already told you the movie is made up.
The Count Basie gag is the one I’d show anybody who doubts Brooks knew what he was doing. On its face it’s a cheap laugh, and it’s also the film telling you the frontier was always a soundstage. I think it’s the best single idea in the picture.
Breaking the frame is expensive and should buy something. Every time you remind the audience they’re watching a construction, you spend some of their investment in the story.
Spend it on an argument. Brooks breaks the fourth wall to expose the Western as a set of choices. That’s the move that licenses everything else in the film. A fourth wall break that only signals cleverness has cost you and bought nothing.
Note the escalation. Small punctures early, larger ones later, total collapse at the end. If you’re going to leave the frame entirely, train the audience for it across the whole running time.
What the Ending Costs
The climax leaves the story completely. The brawl spills off the backlot into a musical soundstage, then into the studio commissary, then into a cinema on Hollywood Boulevard where Bart and the Kid watch the end of their own film.
As a demolition it’s committed and funny. As an ending it abandons the argument. Everything the film built about Rock Ridge, about a town learning to accept a sheriff it tried to kill, gets waved off in favor of a stunt. Brooks was making a point about the genre eating itself and he has every right to make it. My objection is arithmetic. The film spends eighty minutes constructing something specific and ten minutes deciding specificity was never the goal.
It’s also the section that’s aged least well, because the meta comedy Brooks was inventing has since been done a thousand times by people with less to say. The parts nobody has successfully copied are the parts about Bart.
Why It Survived and What That Means
In February 1974 the film opened to mixed reviews. Vincent Canby in the New York Times was unimpressed. It went on to be the biggest box office hit of its year, made for two point six million dollars, and it was added to the National Film Registry in 2006.
The received wisdom is that it couldn’t be made today, and that’s the list this review sits on. The claim is worth examining instead of repeating. What couldn’t be made today is a studio comedy where a Black co-writer sets the terms for how racist language gets deployed and the studio accepts it.
The language itself isn’t the obstacle. Films use it. What has gone is the arrangement that produced this one: five writers in a room including Pryor, a director willing to be told he was wrong, and a studio that didn’t preview the film into safety.
Brooks has told the story of the disastrous first screening for Warner executives, who wanted the punching of a horse removed along with most of the rest. He kept it, and that couldn’t happen now.
A collaborator with standing to say no is worth more than a rewrite. Pryor’s authority over the racial material is why the film is precise instead of reckless, and precision is what let it survive.
When the note comes to sand something down, ask what the note is protecting. Executives asked Brooks to remove the elements that made the film mean something, on the grounds that they were uncomfortable. Discomfort was the mechanism.
You won’t always be able to refuse. Know which two or three elements are essential before the conversation starts, and trade everything else to keep them.
Should you watch Blazing Saddles?
Yes, and watch the first eighty minutes with attention to who is speaking. The campfire scene and the fourth wall made its reputation, and I love its real achievement, a Western where the sheriff is the smartest man in the state and every bigot who opens his mouth loses the exchange. That justifies the 9 even with an ending that throws half of it away.
