Review for Blazing Saddles - 40th Anniversary Edition

Introduction

They say that familiarity breeds contempt, but for me, familiarity tends to breed tedium. So often I have revisited my favourite films, my favourite shows only for me to be so intimately knowledgeable about them that I wind up sleeping through them. There comes a point when if you can quote a movie’s script before the actors speak their line, you should put that film away for ten or twenty years. My father introduced Blazing Saddles to me when I was a boy, far younger than its age rating, and thanks to our first VHS recorder, it got a whole lot of play in our house. So it was a film that I never bothered upgrading to retail VHS, or DVD. And it probably has been twenty years since I last watched it... And five minutes in I’m already quoting lines at the TV screen, “Excuse me while I whip this out!”


The railroad is going through Rock Ridge, which is the perfect opportunity for a lucrative land grab by Attorney General Hedley Lamarr. Of course the citizens of Rock Ridge would demand a new sheriff from the State Governor LePetomane after Lamarr’s first rambunctious attempt to drive them off. But Lamarr has another brainwave; give them a sheriff that they cannot countenance. That seems like good news at first for railroad worker Bart, who is currently on death row for walloping his overseer Taggart with a shovel, a timely reprieve. But a black sheriff in a town full of Johnsons is still dicing with death at every turn. The only help that he finds is in the town jail, a washed up alcoholic gunslinger, the Waco Kid.

Picture

Blazing Saddles apparently got a new transfer for this 40th Anniversary release, although I haven’t seen any other releases to compare. Indeed this is my first time watching it in the original aspect ratio of 2.40:1, presented here in widescreen 1080p. It certainly makes a dramatic change from the pan and scan VHS recording I had. It’s a good transfer, clear and sharp for the most part, a stable and clean print with excellent detail, and a natural level of film grain. There is the odd moment of softness that I attribute to the source material; one example of a soft focus Mongo with a pin sharp neck tends to incriminate the focus. Colours are strong and consistent, while blacks are well-defined. More of an issue is the almost constant flicker in the image. I’m used to flicker in catalogue film transfers, but it’s more apparent in Blazing Saddles than any other vintage film that I have seen before on Blu-ray.

Sound

You have the choice between DTS-HD MA 5.1 Surround English, and DD 1.0 Mono Spanish, French, German and Italian, with subtitles in these languages plus Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Italian. The original mono English track would have been preferable, but the Surround mix isn’t too far off, keeping most of the audio experience front and centre. The dialogue is clear, and the action comes across well, but it does sound like a movie made in 1974, and lacks any of the punch or aural extravagance that you’d expect from a modern film.

Extras

You get one disc in a Blu-ray Amaray, and the disc presents its content with a static menu.

Newly recorded for this disc is the Behind the Scenes: Blaze of Glory: Mel Brooks’ Wild, Wild West featurette which lasts 29:41 HD. It’s an interview with Brooks regarding Westerns, with the odd bit of input from Gene Wilder as well.

The rest of the extras are taken from previous releases of the film dating back to 1997.

The Scene Specific Commentary from Mel Brooks is an engaging anecdotal history of the film.


Behind the Scenes: Back in the Saddle lasts 28:24 480i SD, and is another retrospective with more interviews with the cast.

Black Bart is a pilot episode for a TV spin-off series starring Lou Gossett Jr. as Sheriff Bart. It lacks the funny of the film. It lasts 24:31 and is in 480i.

You get 7 Deleted Scenes running to 9.53, again in 480i.

Finally there is the theatrical trailer, lasting 2:18 and in SD.

Conclusion

There’s one word which I won’t type here that defines Blazing Saddles. It’s a spoof comedy to be sure, a wonderfully observed, and hilarious send-up of the Western genre, and probably instrumental in knocking a nail into the coffin of the Western back in the seventies. I have seen countless parodies, send-ups of war films, horror movies, teen movies, thrillers and the like, and none of them was as good as Blazing Saddles. The reason being that Blazing Saddles was about something, it dealt with prejudice and bigotry, and as such is far more important a movie, a cinema landmark than many other similar straight films. As Gene Wilder says in one of the interviews, Blazing Saddles punched racism in the face, gave it a bloody nose, and did it while everyone was laughing. You can’t deny its brilliance even today, relevant and incisive comedy that still hits the funny bone, and it still sneakily gets you in the grey matter, forces you to confront your prejudices.


The sad thing is that in a world where a US president can create a false moral equivalence between far right nationalists and anti-racism protestors, we need films like Blazing Saddles even more. The sadder thing is that the political correctness movement has made that impossible. You won’t get films like Blazing Saddles ever again. You won’t get Spike Milligan dressing up as Hitler. You won’t get shows like It Ain’t Half Hot Mum. It was a cruder time back then, prejudice and discrimination was the norm, people wore it on their sleeves, and those fighting it knew that the best way to deal with it was directly, confronting it, calling it out for what it was. Hence the treatment of Bart in this film, a black man in a white world. Blazing Saddles told you straight up what racism was, and then proceeded to tear it down to hilarious effect.


Political correctness was originally a tool to combat prejudice, a way of inculcating a way of speaking in society with the hope that it would foment a way of thinking that would follow. You couldn’t say certain things; you couldn’t treat people in certain ways, which was a brilliant ideal. But it had the effect of muzzling the other side of the debate as well. You can no longer ridicule racists and bigots by parodying their stupidity. The comedy Nazi is a thing of the past, which is a shame. And now we find that the more educated bigots and racists have learned to couch their prejudice in politically correct terms. And the satirists have had the tools to combat their twisted beliefs taken away from them.


Thankfully, Blazing Saddles isn’t going anywhere. It remains one of the best movie comedies ever made. A fourth wall shattering masterpiece that tells a meaningful story while deconstructing the Western genre with comic brilliance. It has wonderful characters, it’s rich with humour, and it pulls no punches. “It’s twue. It’s twue, it’s twue!”