Comedic farces are rarely considered great films and we watch few of them as they usually don’t stand up to the test of time. For that reason, we haven’t really watched much by director Mel Brooks as he is best known for this type of work. This particular film however reached my attention as it is considered one of the few film that make fun of the Western genre, directly aiming at the racism that lies just behind the white-oriented mythmaking of the American West.
Bart is a black laborer working on building a railway when he gets frustrated with the racist foreman and hits his head with a spade. At the same time, the attorney general Hedley Lamarr realizes that rerouting the railway through the town of Rock Ridge will cause the land there to shoot up in value. He hires a gang of thugs to shoot up the town to get the people to leave so that he can buy it up. When the townspeople petition for a new sheriff to replace the one killed by the thugs, the request reaches Lamarr himself. He hatches a plan to sabotage the town further by appointing Bart, who was due to be hanged for his crime, as the new sheriff, reasoning that the town would never accept a black sheriff. Bart however proves to be a shrewd operator and soon befriends an alcoholic gunslinger, the Waco Kid, to be his backup.
No one would be watching this film for its plot and indeed things get crazier towards the end than anyone could ever expect with some truly outlandish fourth wall breaking. But the basic premise is fantastic as the main point is to make fun of dumb white people. The stage is set at the beginning when the white foreman tells the black workers to sing while they work and instead of the expected working song, they respond instead with their own version of Frank Sinatra’s I Get a Kick Out of You which is completely inappropriate for the mood and setting. This just goes to show that as silly and ridiculous as some of the gags are, there really is a great deal of consideration put into its themes. Brooks effectively deflects criticism for portraying white people as stupid hicks by casting himself as the biggest fool of them all, the cross-eyed governor who is more interested in having sex with his big breasted secretary than doing any work. I don’t think this light-hearted silly belittling of white people would work today but it sure is fun to watch.
I really appreciate how this film takes aim at racism by employing reverse ethnic jokes and this was in the 1970s before the political correctness of today. Part of why it works so well lies in its boldness in seizing ownership of black slurs and stereotypes for its own purposes. The film has the white thugs liberally throw around the word nigger, a decision that Brooks apparently received a lot of flack for. It also leans on the tricky stereotype of black people being well endowed and sexually powerful in Bart’s seduction of the German diva Lili von Shtüpp. But these controversial decisions work well in this film because it feels like punching up, not punching down. They’re black power fantasies in a society in which the white people still mostly hold all of the cards and it is completely believable how the lives of Bart and his fellow labourers are worth less than the cost of a cart.
From what I understand, an Asian-themed animated film inspired by Blazing Saddles has been stuck in production hell for years. It’s easy to understand why as the timing is all wrong and the relative power between white people and Asians is different, especially as China seems to be eclipsing the US as the dominant superpower. It just me makes appreciate better how this particular film fills in a unique niche in America’s cultural landscape for being the right kind of film at just the right time. Plus it’s just plain funny and wonderfully entertaining!