Switching around channels on the TV, Susie and I stumbled on and just watched Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein, one of the all-time great movies. It is modeled [very closely, actually] on the original Frankenstein movie with Boris Karloff as the monster. In this version, Peter Boyle plays the monster, Gene Wilder plays the good Doctor, Marty Feldman is his manservant and Teri Garr is his assistant, and there are spectacular smaller performances by Cloris Leachman, Madeleine Kahn, Kenneth Marx, and even a vignette with Gene Hackman.
If you have somehow missed this movie, hunt it up and watch it. It surpasses even Blazing Saddles, the greatest "Western" ever made.
There is simply no joke too low for Brooks to embrace. In his hands, the Borscht Circuit becomes the Vienna of Mozart.
It is wonderful. One of my favorite gags in old Bride of Frankenstein (I think it's in that and not Frankenstein) is the repeated self-admonition by the evil scientist that, under whatever category his latest evil deed is subsumed, it's "his only vice". I think I have that right.
ReplyDeleteBrooks is great; it turned out however that he is no Lubitsch.