Blazing Saddles: The Movie You Couldn’t Make Today, at 50

My wife saw a license plate which truncated “ME SO HORNY” and she had not seen the scene in Full Metal Jacket. So I showed it to her, because you can’t go through life in a world affected by it while not having seen it. 

If you were Stanley Kubrick and you wanted to paint a complete portrait of the inhumanity of the Vietnam War—from the cruelty of basic training to the meaningless destruction of its battlefields—you obviously can’t leave out a scene like this, which wraps up the blithe colonialism of the whole affair, complete with its inherent racism, so perfectly.

This is the scene:

But a lot of people who watch movies are also dummies who bray like a donkey at racist jokes, so you also need to live with the legacy of scenes like that. 

Here’s a scene from South Park that I leave here for no special reason:

My point is that it’s a fine line, depicting racism, just as it is a fine line depicting violence. François Truffaut—a major director in French cinema’s trendsetting, post-war New Wave movement—is said to have once argued that there is no such thing as an anti-war movie, since war looks inherently exciting onscreen. I go so far as to say there is no such thing as a depiction of racism on screen that will not somehow be latched onto as a joke by people who think racism is fuckin’ hilarious.

None of this is the fault of Mel Brooks or Blazing Saddles, one of his damned funniest comedies, turning 50 this year even as Brooks himself continues his lifelong streak of being an absolute real one. Brooks cannot help it that there’s been a vocal contingent of people who bluster about how “You couldn’t make Blazing Saddles today!” and then don’t complete the thought. (The thought is something along the lines of “…because you can’t let people say a full-on, hard-R N-word anymore because of all these snowflakes!” The sort of people who think this way still call people snowflakes.)

The real reason you can’t make Blazing Saddles today is that, sad to say, Gene Wilder and Cleavon Little are no longer with us, and neither is the Hollywood that Blazing Saddles so ably sent up. You can’t make it today because there’s so little to be gained from satirizing the fine, salt-of-the-earth folks who throw around the racial epithets Brooks is dealing with here, when there probably was something to gained from it back when it was made. People are still racist and still act like jackasses about it—Shane Gillis is inexplicably going back to Saturday Night Live even though he got dumped for doing Z-tier anti-Chinese racism “comedy” some five years ago. It’s just that there is no reason to be sending up people like him anymore. Everyone knows you are not supposed to use racist slurs, and those who bravely plant their flag on that hill are now objects not even of pity, not even curiosity, but of categorical dismissal. If you even still care who Shane Gillis is enough to make him the host of anything in the year 2024, you should have your show canceled, much in the same way your grandfather should probably have his car keys confiscated. If you care enough to satirize him, you shouldn’t.

But consider the ’70s, when Blazing Saddles came out. Consider how embarrassingly dated a movie like 1972’s The Cowboys was when it came out, in which John Wayne absolutely, without an ounce of self-consciousness, slings around that N-word. Blazing Saddles came out in 1974, two years after that dinosaur of a Wayne movie, and when Hollywood was well into a transformative time. The corpse of the Hays Code was barely cold in the ground, and the big names in Westerns weren’t Ford or Wayne anymore, but Peckinpah and Eastwood. Blazing Saddles is a spoof of that transforming genre—Brooks’ stock in trade. But it’s also a pointed satire of the time that genre’s bone-deep racism, which it gives both barrels.

It’s the Wild West, and crooked attorney general Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman, spending exactly the appropriate amount of time clarifying that his name is not HEDY Lamarr!) is using his position in the government to profit from the rapacious expansion of the railroad while overseeing an overactive gallows. The dusty town of Rock Ridge stands in the way of Lamarr’s planned railway—as do the people who live there, who are all named Johnson—and he dispatches his posse of goons to drive the people off. Their letter begging the governor for help shows up at his office at the same time as a condemned Black railway laborer, and Lamarr sees an opportunity.

Thus, Bart (Cleavon Little) is given a reprieve from hanging for the sin of not responding too well to being made to drive a handcart into quicksand. The white workers, who just got done mocking Little and his fellow Black workers, are far more concerned with saving the handcart than they are Little and his fellow laborer. Cleaned up and sporting a badge, a gun and a megawatt grin, Little rides into Rock Ridge. His reception is less than enthusiastic.

Though Bart can’t make any headway with the locals, he does make an unlikely friend in the fellow sleeping it off in the drunk tank. Jim (Gene Wilder) is the fastest gun in the West, and the only guy who will give Bart the time of day. Wilder was raised Jewish but wasn’t observant, and the movie doesn’t set up any jokes off of his heritage. It’s the clear and unavoidable subtext of the movie that a Jewish guy and a Black guy are the heroic gunslingers in a genre that basically never let them wear the white hats.

Bart and Jim uncover Lamarr’s scheme and rally the reluctant town together to oppose him, even convincing them to accept the beleaguered minorities that have been building the railroad. (They initially “Won’t take the Irish!” before some additional prodding straightens them out, because Brooks is not leaving anyone behind.) Like most Brooks flicks, Blazing Saddles is fairly light on plot and heavy on gags, and they’re great gags. Brooks aims at the foibles of the Hollywood genre with a laser and then bombs them into oblivion: At one point he dons redface in a scene and then speaks Yiddish, as if to say “What white audience is going to be able to tell the difference anyway?” It’s a gag that’s right on the line, but like Robert Downey Jr. pulling blackface in Tropic Thunder, it’s for the purpose of calling out how goddamned stupid it is to cast a white actor to play someone that’s not white. 

He also just mercilessly makes fun of racists while letting his stars have the time of their lives. When Jim and Bart want to lure Lamarr’s racist men out of sight to snag their uniforms, Bart pops out from behind a hill and shouts “Where all the white women at?” since they’re in a hurry and may as well cut straight to their enemies’ deepest insecurities.

But there’s a tenderness at the heart of Blazing Saddles. Little, who died too young and didn’t have nearly as big a career as he deserved, knows exactly what he’s doing in this movie, and he and Wilder play off each other beautifully. When Bart heads out into town hoping to win the people over, only to get cussed out immediately, Jim’s commiseration is rueful and genuine. There’s a shot where Little cracks up. It’s pretty clear he wasn’t supposed to, but it’s also clear why it was too lovely a blooper not to leave in the film.

The final confrontation set piece (literally a set piece) is so gleefully metatextual it’s difficult to describe. To trick the bad guys, the folks of Rock Ridge make a fake town, one that looks like the simple wooden facades of… a cheapo Hollywood Western. The cast’s mighty final brawl carries them off the set of their movie and onto the studio lot, where they interrupt a heavily choreographed musical number directed by a catty Dom DeLuise. Bart guns down Lamarr in front of Mann’s Chinese Theater (back when it was still called that), then grabs a ticket to the end of his own movie in time to watch himself and Wilder ride off (to a limo that drives them) into the sunset.

Comedy can be cutting without being cruel. It can challenge and confront without stomping on underdogs. Brooks is game as always in Blazing Saddles, playing a corrupt and stupid governor ruled by his dick and the aforementioned redface bit there to make fun of redface, in a movie that drags the racism and exclusion that was at the margins of the Western genre right to the center of the feature. Then Brooks hands the white hats and six-guns to Black and Jewish actors and lets them go to town.

So how in the wide world of sports did the guy manage to make it also read like a paean to that time? Because Blazing Saddles feels like one, once it’s winkingly building plywood sets and breaking the fourth wall. There’s the unmistakable impression that there’s something about an older Hollywood, and an older genre, that Brooks misses. The Western never died, but the world changed around it at about the same time the old studio system that gave rise to it collapsed in on itself, and a newer, grittier Hollywood arose in its place. As any 45 seconds of a Seltzer/Friedberg comedy should remind you, it’s always better to come at a spoof from a place of love than one of hate or dismissal. Brooks clearly has a soft spot for the genre, even as he’s gleefully burning it down.

I tell you, you can’t make a film like this today.

Kenneth Lowe is the salt of the Earth, the clay of the new west. You know… a moron. You can follow him on Twitter @IllusiveKen until it collapses, on Bluesky @illusiveken.bsky.social, and read more at his blog.