2024-02-08 06:39:23
by Filippo Mazzarella
A parody of genres that anticipates the zany cinema of the following decade and lightly touches on more delicate themes
On February 7, 1974, “High Noon/Blazing Saddles” was released in American theaters, Mel Brooks’ third feature film after the successful “Please Don’t Touch the Old Women/The Producers” (1968) and the less successful (and more forgotten) “The Twelve Chairs” (1970). Curiously, its Italian release took place only in February 1975, just five months after that of “Frankenstein Junior/Young Frankenstein” (i.e. the film for which Brooks earned eternal fame in our country as a master of comedy) which had instead debuted in USA in December 1974.
It is the film of the career of the indomitable Mel (now still a lively ninety-seven year old) which decisively marks the entry into the territories of parody, inaugurating a style that is both more raucous and pop, but also richer in challenges to conventions and more inclined to put to the test the cinematic, social and even political norms of his time. Released in an era in which the classic American western had been supplanted by the “ideological” and revisionist readings of New Hollywood (and in Italy in the twilight moment of the flourishing and in its own way subversive trend of the “spaghetti western”), “Mezzogiorno e mezzo of fire” is a bold and reckless step into the territories of an apparently ruleless and, we would say today, “metacinematographic” satire; a pastiche that incorporates slapstick situations and ante litteram precursors of the zany cinema of the following decade, combining them with a humor that is sometimes consciously vulgar and at times markedly Yiddish (although far from the contemporary Allenian models that were consolidating) and an unprecedented taste for “theoretical” mockery ; a parody of genres that however touches on more delicate themes (such as the evident and intertwined criticism of capitalism and racism) with decisive lightness.
The framework is very simple: the film, set in 1874, exactly one hundred years before its time, opens with the construction of a railroad in the turn-of-the-century West (a familiar backdrop for traditional frontier films) whose route must be diverted due to the presence of quicksand. However, Brooks quickly gets rid of conventions, using satire to expose a racism and bigotry typical not only of the more corrivious and commercial works of the Western of yesteryear, but also of American society in the Seventies. Because everything revolves around the plan of the astute and speculative state attorney Hedley “Hedy” Lamarr (Harvey Korman) who thinks he can remove the inhabitants of the town of Rock Ridge, where he must necessarily divert the new route, making them intimidated by a gang of outlaw. However, the citizens surprisingly decide that they want to defend themselves, and therefore demand the appointment of a new sheriff. Lamarr, in cahoots with governor William J. Le Petomane (Mel Brooks), then elects the African-American worker Bart (Cleavon Little) as law enforcement officer, convinced that this will provoke the anger of the inhabitants and accelerate their decision to abandon the field. Initially, the locals actually react as expected; but thanks to his intelligence, Bart, who has appointed the drunken gunslinger Jim “Waco Kid” (Gene Wilder) as his deputy, manages to impose himself on his new fellow citizens, resist the instrumental flattery of the actress Lili von Schtupp (Madeline Kahn) and organize the community to resistance. The Italian title, in line with Brooks’ playful/philological feeling, “corrects” that of the classic “High Noon/High Noon”, 1952, by Fred Zinnemann; the original one, whose translation is “flaming saddles”, veers more towards the director’s nonsense side and instead pays homage to the tone of the US B-Movie titles of the 1950s.
But the film, especially in the gigantic final chase which tears apart the space-time fiction, destroys the “fourth wall” and abandons itself to a series of increasingly surreal gags (such as the breach in a Warner Bros. film set where a director [Dom De Luise] he’s filming a tap dance sequence for a musical; or the inglorious end of Lamarr who is killed in front of the legendary Chinese Theater in Hollywood right on the footprints in the concrete of the icon Douglas Fairbanks; or even the closing sequence in which Bart and Jim watch the end of their own film munching popcorn in the theater where it is shown) revealing its very nature as an “operation” not only on the western genre but on cinema as a whole. A concept and a modus operandi that Brooks would then masterfully derive in his three subsequent masterpieces, mocking in a “Hellzapoppin’” style both the artifice of film production and the industry’s tendency to romanticize the past too romantically: “Frankenstein junior/Young Frankenstein” (1974), a rigorous black and white rereading of the entire Universal horror aesthetic of the Thirties, “The Last Madness of Mel Brooks/Silent Movie” (1975), a “silent” film made in homage/desecration to the era of the dawn of the seventh art, and “High Tension/High Anxiety” (1976), where the entire cinema of Alfred Hitchcock will end up “dizzily” in the crosshairs of even trivial parody (and subtle textual criticism).
It was Brooks’ first truly great major success (he tripled his performance: in fact he also plays the Indian chief and the aviator of Lamarr’s group of criminals) who found himself after his debut with the very good and then inseparable Gene Wilder for a long time and for the occasion also showed off low blows and deadly body gags (such as a memorable and unbearable shower of flatulence aimed at dismantling the normative figure of the cowboys), flashes of totally gratuitous or insanely discordant surrealism and linguistic provocations (such as the repeated use of the term ” nigger”) today frankly unthinkable. A result unfortunately tainted in the Italian edition by too many freedoms of adaptation and dubbing (the incongruous local dialect characterizations of many characters, the senseless distortion of many cultural – and cinephile – references), but which today’s possibilities of recovering the film in its original shape have made it more tolerable. The same practice will then be applied shortly thereafter with very different results to “Frankenstein Junior”: even if in that case, probably unique in the history of “dubbed” cinema, the ingenious inventions of the adaptation will become, at least in the perception of the public Italian, a phenomenal added value rather than a limit. But this, as they say, is another story, which we will deal with in due course.
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February 8, 2024 (modified February 8, 2024 | 07:38)
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