The Critic

At first I didn't understand anything about the work (mainly because I'm Brazilian, I don't have subtitles and I still understand little English), however, when I listened more carefully and tried to know the context in which the work was conceived, I understood the message that is a joke with all of us lovers of the seventh art.

After years of hearing of the short narrated by Mel Brooks as a very old man, I finally got to see The Critic on YouTube. All that abstraction and Brooks as an 81-year-old Jewish man from Russia about to die soon has got me in stitches! And that harpsichord music! If you've only known Brooks as the co-creator of "Get Smart" or the director of such movie classics as The Producers, The Twelve Chairs, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankinstein, and Spaceballs (I know some might dispute the last title) or as the 2,000-year-old man with straight man Carl Reiner, then I highly recommend you seek out The Critic on YouTube and hope someone puts it out on DVD soon! Also recommended to animation buffs especially Ernie Pintoff fans.

This Oscar-winning 4-minute cartoon beat the recently-viewed AUTOMANIA 2000 (1963), which I had rated ***1/2! That said, it is a classic and undeniably original. The premise could not be simpler: a grumpy critic on the soundtrack – voiced by a pre-stardom Mel Brooks! – assesses a variety of shapes that come up on the screen. He is understandably exasperated by their constant striving for attention or, if you like, to create meaning (which is often indecipherable anyway!) out of nonsense. It is a pretty sharp and witty jab at art-house cinema, then in something of a worldwide creative peak, which found the adulation of intellectual film reviewers but were deemed pretentious by – and went over the heads of – mainstream American audiences. Conversely, however, this can also be seen as an indictment of the unsophisticated tastes of casual moviegoers.

This short film by Ernest Pintoff is probably the funniest short ever made. It stars Mel Brooks as an Old Man from Russia who watches a series of abstract cartoons. He can make neither head nor tail of them, and comments outrageously the entire time, much to the disturbance of the other patrons. Here is some of the earliest Brooks humor, and already it keeps your rolling in the aisles! Produced in association with Brooks' Crossbow Productions (the precursor of Brooksfilms).

I saw The Critic in the mid-70's as a short before some comedy, and while I don't remember the movie it preceded, I'll never forget Pintoff's tiny gem of a film. The v/o commentary that accompanies the very 60's-era (and very European) abstract animation is the funniest narration I have ever heard in any film -- long or short -- and nobody, NOBODY could have delivered it better than Mel Brooks. The magic of the whole concept is that you truly do feel like the old geezer is sitting right next to you in the theater -- a masterful stroke of comedic/filmic genius. It's a crying shame that The Critic appears to be out of circulation...