BLAZING SADDLES kicks off free Mel Brooks film series at the Museum of Jewish Heritage
Museum of Jewish Heritage
36 Battery Pl.
Wednesdays from June 27 through August 8 (except July 4), free, 6:30
646-437-4202
www.mjhnyc.org
Born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn in 1926, Jewish funnyman Mel Brooks has been spoofing television and movies for more than sixty years, beginning with the seminal Your Show of Shows in the 1950s and continuing through a series of films that have torn up various genres in hysterical ways. The Museum of Jewish Heritage pays tribute to the comedy legend with a free series of screenings on Wednesday nights at 6:30 from June 27 through August 8 (except for July 4), wisely including his better works while avoiding his duds. The festival begins with the outrageous laugh fest Blazing Saddles (1974), in which a black sheriff (Cleavon Little) comes to the racist western town of Rock Ridge and teams up with alcoholic sharpshooter the Waco Kid (Gene Wilder) to teach everybody a valuable lesson. (The screening will be introduced by critic Leonard Quart.) On July 11, Brooks takes on the horror genre with the riotous Young Frankenstein, (1974), with Wilder starring as Frederick Frankenstein, a young doctor who has tried to avoid the family legacy but soon finds himself holed up in his Transylvanian castle bringing life to a monster (Peter Boyle) with the help of a dimwitted assistant (Marty Feldman) and a Scandinavian beauty (Teri Garr). On July 18, Mel Funn (Brooks), Dom Bell (Dom DeLuise), and Marty Eggs (Feldman) try to recruit such stars as Burt Reynolds, James Caan, and Paul Newman to appear in their modern-day Silent Movie (1976). On July 25, Brooks incorporates such Hitchcock classics as The Birds, Psycho, Vertigo, North by Northwest, The Wrong Man, and Spellbound into the 1977 comic thriller High Anxiety, which also includes such Brooks regulars as Madeline Kahn, Harvey Korman, Cloris Leachman, Ron Carey, and Howard Morris. Brooks goes historical in the five-part History of the World: Part I (1981), parodying biblical epics, Roman sandal dramas, French Revolution tales, and more, with the help of narrator Orson Welles, John Hurt as Jesus Christ, and Brooks himself as Moses, Torquemada, and Louis XVI, giving himself the opportunity to say what would become one of his trademark lines, “It’s good to be the king.” The series concludes on August 8 with Brooks’s 1983 remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 classic To Be or Not to Be, about a Warsaw theater company trying to trick the Nazis, with Brooks and his wife, Anne Bancroft, re-creating the roles originally played by Jack Benny and Carole Lombard. These six films, made in a particularly fruitful nine-year period, cemented Brooks’s reputation as a comic genius, which was already well on its way with his earlier films, The Producers and The Twelve Chairs, and thankfully has not lost its luster with such later losers as Spaceballs, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, and Dracula: Dead and Loving It, his last film, made in 1995, after which he headed to Broadway. Free tickets for the Museum of Jewish Heritage series can be picked up at the box office at 3:00 on the day of the show or can be reserved in advance with a minimum donation of $5.