Mel Brooks had grown up with comedy, clowning around the Borsch belt to high level tv gigs, the series Get Smart and so on. When he was led with one project from a musical to a novel to a movie that he fell into directing he came up with The Producers, one of the most durably funny comedy movies ever. After The Twelve Chairs and then the Western bashing Blazing Saddles, his regular cast leader, Gene Wilder came to him with this story of old school monster movies and lipgloss. Brooks jumped at it and made one my favourite comedies.
It's harder to write about comedy without dragging it into a bog of obvious statements and try-hard joke transfers, so I'll say very little about them (and this might end up very short). Sticking to the film making, though, I can say that Brooks starts with what might have been an acceptable but dull parody of classic Hollywood or something absurdly overblown and self-sabotaging. Instead, he renders unto Caesar.
Young Frankenstein has just enough of the chiaroscuro of the 1930s but not so much that it bleeds over the performances. He gives us a widescreen image rather than the near square of academy ratio. And he offers an ensemble cast who only break through their performances into histrionics when the film itself does. So, this is neither a smugly modern take on an antique form of cinema nor a slavishly reproduced curio (like a proto Guy Maddin). It's a mainstream comedy movie that gives us enough atmosphere of mists, castle walls and thunderstorms to beckon us in and bear a well told, if simple, story that itself serves up some very durable jokes (and a few flat fallers, but you can't have it all).
The variation in performance styles is kept under the rise and fall of Brooks's baton. It can work when Gene Wilder is screaming, Terri Garr is wailing, Marty Feldman's mugging with an understated one liner and Cloris Leachman is flailing like an old Shakespearian all at once just as easily as when Wilder is holding everything he has back or Feldman interrupts with a splutteringly funny ad lib. Contrast this with any horror comedy that misjudges the horror premise's gravitas and goes full camp. A lonely few ever make it to the end of these endeavours. It's a tough blend: do you go funny, here, or scary? Mel Brooks knew how W.C. Fields made a blind man work in a comedy setting by making him a threat. He even repeats the lesson, here. Leveraging the tension of the genre is a friend, not a hurdle, but then it needs an expert to judge, to smooth, to disrupt, to let the chaos break and to cut when it gets too explosive. Young Frankenstein is a cinema comedy textbook.
Not everything lands. There are five decades between then and now and yesterday's archness can be today's smarminess. This film survives its moments of awkwardness. Well, there aren't that many - the intersecting of performance, writing and judgement see to that - but that we still notice them reinforces the rule they break. Comedy is tough; it fails more than it works, it can delight one day and fall into contempt the next and ,whatever its fortunes, must be able to get off its bum and try again. Comedy has no friends. It does, however, enhance and if we find ourselves in our praise of it, talking of it as though it were good table service, then even that slight acknowledgement will suffice, until we see the best of it again and it slaps us down with its power. That's what Young Frankenstein does.
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