Blazing Saddles Review

Brooks runs the film as pure gag density, which means the hit rate is uneven and the misses arrive quickly enough not to matter. The best material is verbal rather than slapstick: a town of identically named citizens, a railroad foreman politely requesting a good old spiritual, a governor incapable of finishing a sentence. Cleavon Little plays Bart with unbothered cool, letting the bigotry around him look ridiculous rather than dangerous, and Gene Wilder's stillness as the Waco Kid is the film's best structural decision, an anchor to hang chaos from.

Madeline Kahn's Dietrich pastiche is a full performance rather than a sketch, sung with real technique and total exhaustion. The campfire scene is exactly the kind of joke that only works once, and it works. What holds the film back is architecture. There is no plot to speak of, the direction is flatly televisual, and the ending is a confession of that fact, crashing through the set into a neighboring musical because there was nowhere else to go.