Blazing Saddles (DVD)

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It wouldn't be a Mel Brooks film without music, so he wrote three songs especially for the show: "I'm Tired," "The French Mistake," and "The Ballad of Rock Ridge," and he cowrote the title song, "Blazing Saddles." But Brooks needed someone to sing the title tune, someone, he thought, like Frankie Laine, who had made such Western hits as "Mule Train," "Rawhide," and "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral." But who could imitate Laine? Well, how about Laine? Brooks asked him and he did it.

Anyway, half the time Brooks is the clever, witty raconteur, and half the time he's the naughty schoolboy trying to shock and offend his parents' house guests. Racism and prejudice feel the brunt of Brooks's barbs, and here he spares no one. As Lamarr declares in a hiring poster: "Help wanted: Heartless Villains for Destruction of Rock Ridge. Criminal Record Required. Hedley Lamarr, an Equal Opportunity Employer." Well, Brooks is an equal-opportunity satirist, and it's not only white bigots who get zapped but Jews, Native Americans, gays, Germans, preachers, all rolled into one.

Notoriously, the word "nigger" gets a workout, offending probably as many people as it enlightened, but always used to the detriment of its users if white and affectionately if black. The movie is a slap in the face of racial intolerance, doing so with the back of the hand, making us both recognize and laugh at society's narrow-minded bigotries. "You've got to remember," comments the Waco Kid, "that these are just simple farmers; these are people of the land, the common clay of the new West. You know, morons."

Yes, there are more than few memorable lines: "Excuse me while I whip this out," says Sheriff Bart to the townsfolk. "Why don't you loosen your bullets?" says Lili to the Sheriff. "Head 'em off at the pass? I hate that cliché," says Lamarr to Taggart. "You are about to embark on a great crusade," Lamarr tells his henchmen, "to stamp out runaway decency in the West."

Should I also remind you of the campfire scene and the baked beans? I thought not.

The ending is pure Brooks as the entire cast of "Blazing Saddles" in a moment of cinematic reflexivity overflows into the soundstage of another film production, and the sheriff has to follow Lamarr to the movie's own première for the final shoot-out. Harrumph, harrumph!

Video:
One of my associates at DVD Town, Jason Van Bergen, reviewed WB's previous DVD edition of "Blazing Saddles" and found the picture and sound less than commendable. I'm happy to say that the situation has been rectified in this new 30th Anniversary Special Edition. The movie is transferred to disc at about the same anamorphic, widescreen Panavision ratio as before, here measuring out at about 2.18:1, but at a higher bit rate, rendering its image sharper and its colors deeper and brighter. There are moments of minor fade, to be sure, but they are few and far between, grain is mostly absent, and jittery lines are a thing of the past.

Audio:
The film's original 1.0 monaural sound that Jason so bemoaned has been remixed in Dolby Digital 5.1 and is obviously an improvement. It isn't perfect by a fair measure, but it's good. In fact, there is now a reasonably wide front stereo spread, with strong dynamic impact. But the rear channels are still not fed much in the way of a signal, and there is little deep bass to speak of. The surround speakers are used only for modest musical ambiance enhancement and the occasional ricochetting gunshot. Perhaps the newly remastered soundtrack's only serious fault, however, is a slight tendency toward nasality in voices, which becomes irksome as the movie goes on, seemingly more pronounced toward the end of the film. In any case, the new sonics are welcome and make the home theater experience more pleasurable.

Extras:
For this thirtieth anniversary of the film's release, Warner Bros. have come up with a decent assortment of bonus materials to keep avid fans of the movie occupied after they've watched the show. The first item is a scene-specific commentary by Mel Brooks. The next is a 2001 cast and crew reunion documentary, "Back in the Saddle," twenty-eight minutes long. In it, cowriter Andrew Bergman says he wanted the movie to reveal a hip, 1974 sensibility in an 1874 setting. Reminiscences come from Brooks, Wilder, Gilliam, Korman, and others. Then, there's a brief, three-minute tribute excerpt, "Intimate Portrait: Madeline Kahn"; followed by twenty-four minutes of "Black Bart," the 1975 TV pilot inspired by the movie; and nine minutes of additional scenes, many of which were later edited into a longer, television version of the movie. Finally, there are twenty-six scene selections; English (5.1), French (mono), and Spanish (mono) spoken languages; and English, French, and Spanish subtitles.

Warner Bros. seem to have finally abandoned the dreaded snapper case for the more convenient keep case, but they do not appear to be including a chapter-selection insert with every release. This one, for instance, has none.

Parting Thoughts:
How can you not like a Western where the heroes ride off into the sunset in a Cadillac El Dorado? I mean, it's so...Hollywood. And so funny. Much of "Blazing Saddles" may seem less than inspired, its style has been imitated so often, but the parts that work still provoke strong laughs no matter how often you've seen them. Face it, it's a landmark film from a funnyman who continues to remain commercially strong and vibrant to this day. Harrumph, harrumph!

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