La Dernière Folie de Mel Brooks

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.

I suppose if anything epitomizes the style of Mel Brooks it is audacity, obscenity and a forthright quality that others seem either reluctant to use or often overplay with disastrous results. Brooks will do anything for a laugh. Anything. He is, for all intents and purposes, incapable of embarrassment. He's a rabble-rouser. His movies abide in a world in which everything is likely, especially the outrageous, and Silent Movie, where Brooks makes a bountiful aesthetic gamble and pulls it off, makes me laugh abundantly. On the Brooks calibration of amusement, I laughed not too radically more or less than at Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles or The Producers. It just doesn't have the subversive and ironic panache of those classic films.

Brooks' fifth film as director, Silent Movie is streamlined fun. It's obvious in almost every shot that the filmmakers had a party making it. It's set in Hollywood, where Big Pictures Studio lurches on the brink of Chapter 11 and a merger with the mammoth Engulf and Devour syndicate, a daintily disguised reference to Gulf+Western's Paramount takeover. Enter Mel Funn (guess who), a has-been director whose career was stopped cold by drunkenness, who pledges to salvage the studio by persuading Hollywood's biggest stars to make a silent movie. This is a scenario that results in countless inside jokes, but the thing about Brooks's inside jokes is that their outsides are funny as well.

The wild bunch of Mel, Dom DeLuise and Marty Feldman embark to charm the superstars, resulting in the shower of one, who counts his hands, confused, and discovers he has eight; and swooping another out of a nightclub audience. There are several "actual" stars in the movie, but the fun is in not knowing who's next. Everything transpires surrounded by a glossary of sight gags, classic and original. There are bits that don't work and durations of up to a minute, I guess, when we don't laugh, but a minute can feel pretty long. Perhaps it is Brooks' desire to control all that displaces an objective view of what will work.

Nevertheless, in a movie overflowing with skillful Chaplin-, Keaton- and Laurel and Hardy-inspired set pieces, these parts are the chef d'oeuvre: Right before seeing the Studio Chief, Mel and his friends cross their fingers for good luck, and Mel can't uncross his. He shakes hands with the Chief, and the Chief's fingers are crossed rather than Mel's. The Chief then passes this crossed state to his secretary's fingers the same way. Another running gag is obvious discrepancy between the title cards and what the characters are really saying. The spoken lines are inaudible, as it is indeed a silent movie, but they can be clearly lipread. At one point Brooks asserts misgivings about DeLuise's idea of a silent movie by shouting "That's crazy!" as well as an agitated mouthful, but the screen says "Maybe you're right." In another scene, Marty hits on a nurse but gets slapped. When he gets back in the car, Mel obviously mouths a curse word, although the screen says "You bad boy!" And then there's the scene where Feldman and DeLuise haphazardly unplug and plug in his heart monitor various times, winding up changing the screen to a ping pong game and playing while the Chief flatlines and recovers over and over. Brooks stands outside the majority of Jewish comics and filmmakers in his lack of self-derision and in the success of his main characters, but still, humor is his own defense mechanism against the world, and he goes for broke.

Of course, only Mel Brooks could have the idea to make a silent movie in today's Hollywood. And silent it is-this isn't one of those films like "City Lights","Modern Times","Bean" or "Playtime" that uses background noises and dialogue. No, aside from the brilliant John Morris score, the film is completely silent. Being that this is a Mel Brooks comedy, this COULD be considered a downside. It is filled with sight gags, from a pregnant woman upsetting the balance of the back of the car; the reaction of the executives to Vilma Kaplan, the sultry spy; the video pong-game on the life support machine; and of course, the fly in the soup. Unfortunately, there are stretches where the action moves very slowly, without sufficient explanation. Also, the music score occasionally has very unpleasant, loud drum crashes to indicate when there is action, and these can be an unpleasant contrast to the surprisingly quietly recorded music score. If you want to hear the music score, you'd best buy the soundtrack, where it is clear of the drum/cymbal crashes. The soundtrack mixes bits and pieces of "The Emperor's Waltz"(Strauss) and "Jalousie"(Bloom-Gade) as well as "Babalu"(Lecuona-Russell). The cast includes six main guest stars, as well as character actors like Chuck McCann, Jack Riley, Howard Hesseman and Fritz Feld. On top of this, Harry Ritz of the Ritz Brothers, Henny Youngman, and even Barry Levinson (DINER,HOMICIDE:LIFE ON THE STREETS) as a movie executive. All in all, it makes for genial entertainment and if nothing else should be seen to gain an appreciation of silent comedy. As a movie, it gets a 8/10. For a Mel Brooks film, it gets 7/10 on the Laff scale.