High Anxiety

With High Anxiety (1977), Mel Brooks spoofs Hitchcock, with mixed results. He plays a psychiatrist with a fear of heights who takes over a prestigious mental institution. The previous head of the institute died under mysterious circumstances, and the other staff members embody a variety of bizarre and suspicious qualities.

The gags are non-stop, but most of them seem hastily assembled and forced, and instead of inventing his own unique storyline that finds ways to make fun of the genre (like he and Gene Wilder did in Young Frankenstein), Brooks just slaps together a handful of plots from various Hitchcock movies, and relies on the mugging of his usual band of performers to fill in the gaps.

Some worthwhile moments make it in: Mel sings an amusing little number in an attempt to woo the lovely Madeline Kahn (who doesn't look right in a blonde wig--her natural red hair is gorgeous), and it's fun watching Harvey Korman and Cloris Leachman ham it up. But the material is beneath them. It's beyond juvenile at times. 

With Howard Morris, Ron Carey, Dick Van Patten, and Rudy De Luca.

Young Frankenstein

The line between horror and comedy is tenuous, which is why so many horror films unintentionally enter into the domain of comedy. The straight horror film's mission of terrifying the audience frequently fails because the audience proffers a new, reverse-mission onto the film: to engender heckling and laughter. This is, perhaps, why Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein (1974) is still so funny. It tells the straight horror story, but allows its over-the-top nature to reign freely.

Gene Wilder, whose performance would be criticized as too much in a serious film, suddenly becomes nothing short of magnificent. He possesses an energy that few actors can summon, and turns Victor Frankenstein into a live wire: a mad genius obsessively devoted to science and to his "creation," a reanimated corpse. He becomes endearing within seconds of that first scene, in the lecture room, where he corrects a taunting medical student on the pronunciation of his name, which he has changed to "Fronk-en-steen." He doesn't want to be linked to his famous ancestor, the original Dr. Frankenstein.

What's interesting about that scene--and indeed, the entire movie--is how much effort the director, Mel Brooks, and Wilder himself (who co-wrote the screenplay with Brooks) invest into recreating the look and feel of a 1930s Universal monster classic. The black-and-white cinematography, the antiquated sets--many borrowed from the original movies themselves, John Morris's beautiful music score, all work toward creating a legitimate representation of those films. It's in the process of carefully reconstructing the elements of the classics that Brooks and company turn every convention into a gag, pointing up (and out) the humorous side of horror. The humor has always been there, but was de-emphasized by the "serious" movies.

Marty Feldman is one of Young Frankenstein's greatest assets. As the hunchbacked assistant, Igor, Feldman never gave a funnier performance. He's a foil to Wilder's unflinching devotion to the art of science. Cloris Leachman, who has always been game when it comes to being made-up in nightmarishly unattractive make-up and costume schemes, plays the creepy Frau Blucher. Madeline Kahn turns in a small but memorable part as Frankenstein's neurotic, repressed fiance who becomes a love interest for the Monster (Peter Boyle), Teri Garr plays Frankenstein's naive East European assistant, Kenneth Mars plays an eccentric local inspector with a fake arm, and Gene Hackman has a fun cameo as a blind man who's visited by the monster.

Young Frankenstein may be Mel Brooks' best overall film. It does "spoof" right--telling its own story and letting the humor find its way to the surface. (Even still, Brooks and Wilder and the supporting cast have taken care to drench the movie in gags of every kind, in case things weren't funny enough). It's a classic, one that I always like to watch around Halloween. ★★★★

Clue

Clue (1985) is, I think, the kind of movie you appreciate more as a kid than as an adult. From my grown-up mind, it seems pretty hair-brained to try and adapt a board game into a movie. But I remember how thrilled I was to discover, retroactively you might say, that someone had turned my favorite murder-mystery-board-game into a feature film, a comedy no less, with some of my favorite actors!

Madeline Kahn, the underrated, red-headed beauty with that unmistakable voice (Megan Mullally may be her distant cousin), donning a black wig as Mrs. White; and Lesley Ann Warren, who I remembered from the Rodgers and Hammerstein Cinderella. Warren and Kahn both have beautiful singing voices, but neither of them ever really got to do as much with their voices in the movies (at least, not as much as I would have liked). There was Kahn's astonishingly funny and naughty performance as Lily Von Schtpp, the German saloon singer a la Marlene Dietrich, in Blazing Saddles, and Warren's effortless-looking performance as a floozy with a shrill, unsophisticated voice (not unlike Jean Hagen's in Singin' in the Rain) in Victor/Victoria, but as much as their talents were on display in these films, these women were never really given their due.

I think both of them shine in Clue, which isn't a particularly sophisticated comedy. It's not even a very well-thought-out comic mystery, about as subtle as Neil Simon's amusing but misfired Murder By Death. In Clue, Lesley Ann Warren plays Miss Scarlet, and she looks stunning and comfortable playing a cool bad girl, someone who once ran a brothel in Washington D.C. Warren is at her best here because she's not acting the dumb blonde: I think she's funnier when she's smart. And Kahn, as Mrs. White, delivers a subtly insane performance that may not stand out next to Lily from Blazing Saddles or Elizabeth from Young Frankenstein, and yet it's appropriately weird and Kahn-esque.

The plot of Clue is about what you'd expect from a movie adaptation of a game. The six suspects (Colonel Mustard, Mrs. Peacock, Professor Plum, et al) are gathered at an ominous Victorian mansion on a dark and stormy night (the film is needlessly set in 1954 so that it can exhaust the already exhausted limits of the comic value of the Red Scare and J. Edgar Hoover). They are confronted with various crimes (a la Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None) and then it's revealed that the seventh guest, Mr. Boddy, is blackmailing all of them. Pretty soon, Boddy winds up dead, and the task of figuring out whodunit is put on them.

The jokes are hit and miss, and the story itself fizzles out long before the movie ends. But the performances make it worth seeing, particularly that of Tim Curry, as the butler and the man who's ultimately running the show. Curry's energy is unmatched. He's like a wind-up toy that keeps going and going despite all the punishing efforts of the children who are winding him up and laughing every time he runs into a wall or falls on his face. Eileen Brennan, Michael McKean, Martin Mull, Christopher Lloyd, Colleen Camp, and Lee Ving co-star. Written by the director, Jonathan Lynn, from a story idea by John Landis, and produced by Debra Hill. ★★½