Thursday, April 07, 2016

Maybe he Should Change The Name, Not Just The Pronunciation

I had never gotten around to see Young Frankenstein, until some coworkers were watching it a couple of weeks ago. For what it's worth, I still prefer Blazing Saddles, but I'm more a fan of westerns than horror movies, so no surprise there.

There are definitely some parts of Young Frankenstein I enjoyed, Igor deliberately pronouncing his name differently because of Dr. "Frankensteen". Marty Feldman in general was gold, and the random appearance of Gene Hackman as the lonely blind man, that was good. Gene Wilder in general is good. He has this air of long-suffering calm, and then he'll just flip out. It's effective, even when I know it's coming, it's still surprising.

Mel Brooks' films seem to do a good job with angry crowds. Whether they're mad about a black sheriff, or a reanimated corpse, or Prince John, he seems to capture that confusion. Everybody's just angry. Alone, none of them would do anything, and you can even reason with them, or get them to stop, because they're just angry about a lot of things (jobs, sickness, whatever it is people get angry about), and taking it out on this one particular thing. Granted that in the real world we usually can't convince them to stop, but it's an interesting idea that maybe people are mostly reasonable if you give them a chance. Or else they're just cowards, and once you make it obvious someone with a clear head is paying attention to the shit they're about to do, they freeze up. I need to think about this more.

I think more Madeline Kahn would have been good. Her character really didn't get to do much.

2 comments:

SallyP said...

I always loved how the horse would Whinny whenever they mentioned Frau Blucher's name. And Gene Hackman was a hoot.

CalvinPitt said...

I forgot about the gag with the horse. You're right, that was good.