Mel Brooks letzte Verrücktheit - Silent Movie

If you're a Mel Brooks fan, you've probably heard of SILENT MOVIE--and my advice is to see it if you haven't yet.

It's one of his more brilliant and inventive ideas and it gets the wacky screen treatment you expect from Brooks. Naturally, it's not really silent. There is a very well-timed background score (no, not a tinkling piano) and all of the thuds are vigorously heard on the soundtrack. But there's no dialog--you read the silly captions that replace the sound of voices, just as folks did way back when.

Sid Ceasar is a film producer that Mel has to convince to let him do a "silent movie". He agrees provided Mel hires well-known movie stars to give it box-office insurance. That's the gist of the plot which then has MEL BROOKS and DOM DeLUISE scouting around Hollywood for stars like Paul Newman, Liza Minnelli, James Caan and Anne Bancroft to star in the film.

It's full of the usual sight gags, the falls on banana peels, through trap doors, everything that happened in a Keystone Kops comedy. Maybe not the funniest Brooks caper but still loads of fun to watch with a brisk running time of 87 minutes.

When one speaks of Mel Brooks the talk immediately goes to either "Blazing Saddles" or "Young Frankenstein" or "The Producers." How often do you hear mention of "Silent Movie?" After watching this film again just yesterday I can say that this film is also a masterpiece and ranks on the same lines of the previous films.

"Silent Movie" is deceptively simple in plot. A washed up movie director (Brooks) comes up with an idea to make a silent movie to help save the studio that once employed him. Once given the okay by studio chief Sid Caesar, Brooks and his sidekicks Marty Feldman and Dom DeLuise set out to find five superstars to help make the movie a hit. And that's all there is to it - plot wise. What Brooks does is fill every single scene with great ideas. Shots that have absolutely nothing to do with the story are thrown in to get a laugh. Brooks hits the bullseye most of the time. I don't think I went more then a minute without laughing throughout.

Another master stroke is John Morris' rousing score that fills the movie from beginning to end. Without it the movie would have failed. And, yes, it truly is a silent movie save for one spoken word which most people probably are aware of anyway. It's another classic Mel Brooks moment.

"Silent Movie" followed "Young Frankenstein" which followed "Blazing Saddles." It's safe to say Brooks was at his peak during this period. His quality of films began to dip after "Silent Movie" starting with the amusing but overblown "High Anxiety." But we still have this time period to savor when Brooks may have been the best (if not then equal to Woody Allen) comedy director of his time.

I see this described as a parody of silent comedies, and it's not. It's...just a silent comedy. I'm not sure how you parody comedies, but I don't think it ends up being just another example of the genre. Without getting into the sheer levels of chaotic anarchy of Blazing Saddles or the emotional pathos of The Producers, Mel Brooks made a consistently funny comedy, probably the straightest comedy of his career up to this point. It never reaches the heights of his previous work, but it is definitely and consistently entertaining.

The has been and former alcoholic Hollywood director Mel Funn (Brooks) has decided that he's going to make his comeback with his two friends, Marty Eggs (Marty Feldman) and Dom Bell (Dom DeLuise), in tow. Together, they head to Big Pictures Studios to meet with the Studio Chief (Sid Caesar) to pitch Funn's idea of a silent movie to help save the studio. Beset by a threat from the evil conglomerate Engulf & Devour to purchase the studio, the Chief agrees to Funn's idea but only if he can get all of Hollywood's biggest stars to sign on.

And that's pretty much it. Funn, Eggs, and Bell go from one Hollywood star to the next in a series of gag filled set pieces to sign them on while the head executives Engulf (Harold Gould) and Devour (Ron Carey) try to foil the plans. And this is really what I mean when it's not a parody, it's simply an example of the silent comedy genre. Go back to some of the best examples, like Chaplin's City Lights, and that's pretty much what you have. A thin reed of a plot on which to hang a series of gag filled set pieces. Take the boxing match, for example, in City Lights. It's there because the Tramp needs to make some money, so he accidentally gets roped into a boxing match in which perfectly choreographed comedy is executed. It could have been anything else. It could have been the Trump opening a lemonade stand or the Trump getting roped into a high-level executive meeting, as long as there was a way for Chaplin to find comedy in that context. We get the exact same thing here.

The first star is Burt Reynolds. The three show up at his house, sneak into his shower, and then end up piled on top of each other in a three person high coat in order to try to get into the house after having been kicked out. It's all an excuse for a gag about Mel staying at the top of the coat, everyone tumbling down the hill to the road where Reynolds ends up at the bottom of the trench coat and a compactor running over everything in between. The second star is James Caan, and it's all about trying to keep balance in a wobbly trailer in between scenes of Caan's movie he's making then. The third is Liza Minnelli with the three men dressed in medieval armor and falling all over the place. The fourth is Brooks' wife Anne Bancroft, where the three sweep her off her feet at a club and she gets the opportunity to demonstrate her own physical comedy chops by crossing her eyes independently.

My favorite is the last, Paul Newman. Newman has a broken leg, in a wheelchair, in complete racing getup, and is next to his crashed racing car...at the hospital. When the three approach him in wheelchairs themselves, it breaks out into a mad chase through the hospital ending with Newman doing a daring jump off of a roof and then bringing up the idea of him being in the movie himself. It's madcap and wonderful with Newman just being charming.

Facing defeat, Engulf and Devour conspire to break Funn with sex, hiring the dancer Vilma Kaplan (Bernadette Peters) to break him so he can't make the movie. Eggs and Bell figure her out right as she decides that she loves Funn, creating a situation where Funn goes off the deep end but Vilma can help get him back to where he needs to be.

From beginning to end, it really is just a series of gags, and it's consistently amusing for what it is. I have a smile on my face from beginning to end consistently. It just never rises to the heights of hilarity or ends with any kind of catharsis. It's fun, through and through, and there's not too much more you can ask from a comedy.

Mel Brooks plays a has-been director named Mel Funn in this spoof of Hollywood and silent movies. The film is set in some alternate universe era that is an amalgamation of 1930s through 1970s Hollywood. In the film's world, it's the age of the "talkies", which have apparently been around for some time. Funn's latest script, what he's banking on as his comeback, is retro--he's written a silent movie. Naturally, he's having problems selling his script. Shortly after the film begins, Funn, who is making the rounds with his two questionable companions, Marty Eggs (Marty Feldman) and Dom Bell (Dom DeLuise), shops his script to one last big studio head, played by Sid Caesar. Caesar's studio is about to go under if they can't produce a blockbuster. He initially tries to throw Funn out, but when Funn promises he can get big stars for his film, Caesar gives him a chance. If he can get the stars, he's got a deal. Silent Movie is primarily the story of Funn, Eggs and Bell trying to get stars to do their film.

Of course the irony of Silent Movie is that it's a silent movie about how silent movies would be ridiculous to produce in a later age in Hollywood. The Mel Brooks film itself is ridiculous film in many ways, not the least of which is that it is silent. Brooks also embraces another fading convention--humor based on slapstick and vaudeville.

To a large extent, Silent Movie exists to enable a series of gags, mostly centered on various extended cameos. Often the gags are like a classic comedy compilation--we get Sid Caesar doing his "facial tick schtick", Charlie Callas doing some "blind man" slapstick, Henny Youngman with a fly in his soup, and so on. Marty Feldman's "Eggs" might cause us to ask where the ham is--these classic routines are it.

There are also longer scenes with potential "stars" of the film. These include Burt Reynolds, James Caan, Bernadette Peters, Liza Minelli, Paul Newman, Anne Bancroft, and Marcel Marceau. Sometimes they spoof themselves, sometimes they play roles in new gags, and sometimes they come pretty close to their actual public personae.

Maybe Twentieth Century Fox told Brooks in reality that if he wanted to do a silent film spoof, they'd only bankroll it if he had a lot of stars attached. So he got them, working them into the film without really working them into the fabric of the film (they're present as cameos, not as stars). But there's also a conceit in Silent Movie, as a fiction, that we're not watching the actual film but a film about getting ready to make a film, maybe echoing what happened in "real life" in preparing to make the film. If you want complex self-referential layers, focused on blurring the distinctions between art and reality, Silent Movie definitely provides that. In many respects, the layering is similar to the more recent Incident at Loch Ness (2004).

Maybe such depth is surprising given that the surface aim of Silent Movie is to provide absurdities so you can laugh. The contrast to those easier to decipher surface qualities underscores interesting facts both about the public perception of Mel Brooks and the history of his career. Brooks has often been perceived as aiming for a kind of modernization of the Three Stooges. While his films have qualities that allow for that comparison, it is far from telling the whole story.

Brooks' films (as director) at least through 1981's History of the World, Part I all have a strong postmodernism beneath the veneer. He's not just making us laugh through slapstick and clever, pun-filled dialogue, he's also saying a lot of very intelligent things about the medium of film, as well as the relationship between films and reality, and between films and the audience. A lot of his humor rests on toying with the typical filmic or narrative conventions. For example, he routinely breaks through the "fourth wall" and he routinely breaks the implicit genre contracts he makes. It's just as intellectual as anything Monty Python did--at least until 1987's Spaceballs, which can be seen as the turning point from Brooks' earlier works of genius to a much more straightforward way of storytelling. It's not that Spaceballs and what followed weren't good, but they do not have the same sense of postmodernist play to them as is present in Silent Movie.

In addition to all of the fiction/reality layering, the film breaks the "genre" contracts of silent films in that once in awhile a character says something and we hear their voice on the soundtrack. The music is also frequently synced to the action (this wasn't possible with actual silent films--the technical "solution" that allowed synced music also allowed synced dialogue), and occasionally there is foley (sound effects that are supposed to be the sound of character actions, like walking) synced on the audio track as well. It underscores that this is a faux silent movie, despite the many other apparent cues of authenticity. This is a relatively minor example of postmodernism in the film, perhaps, but nevertheless illustrative of Brooks' goals and interesting to note while watching.

As interesting as all of that is, Silent Movie isn't a complete success. Sometimes it's just a bit too hokey or uneventful for its own good. But it's still an important entry in Brooks' early oeuvre, which is his most significant period in my view.

Mel Brooks' comedies are made for the pure pleasure of having a good time and to enjoy what the master has decided give us in the way of sheer comic relief. His movies are a riot of visual and witty gags; they are completely insane. Granted, his humor is not for everybody, but those of us that appreciate this great man's talent, truly have a ball watching this picture about the lunacy in the movie industry, again and again.

Mr. Brooks and his sidekicks, Dom DeLouise and Marty Feldman do amazing things. Basically it's all visual, since there's no sound for the viewer to react to what one sees on the screen.

The guest cast is incredible as well. Anne Bancroft, Bernadette Peters, Paul Newman, James Caan, Burt Reynolds, Sid Caesar, and the rest appear to be having the time of their lives as Mr. Brooks pull the strings so we can have a great time.

This is a great film to watch with friends; the more, the merrier!