Mel Brooks' Silent Movie is an Irresistible Tribute to Hollywood's Past and Present
In some ways, Mel Brooks was an unlikely pioneer in the field of boundary-pushing bad taste. After all, by the time 1968’s The Producers made Brooks an instant force in our culture with his debut film as a writer-director (and bit player) he was already deep into middle age, and had already triumphed in at least two other fields through his legendary work on Your Show Of Shows and Get Smart and his ground-breaking comedy albums with Carl Reiner.
If Brooks was not a young man when The Producers and Blazing Saddles became instant classics of sublime vulgarity, his sensibility was even older than his age. Brooks is a pure, unapologetic product of vaudeville and the Catskills. He is the living personification of Jewish comedy history as well as American cinema’s preeminent cinematic parodist. This split between the vulgar, brash and provocative and the agreeably old-school and familiar is reflected in Brooks’ breakthrough films.
The Producers is equally rooted in the liberating coarseness that defined some of the era’s boldest and most controversial pop comic provocations and old-school, baggy-pants, lowbrow vaudeville shenanigans. Brooks was ahead of the curve in knowing that people were finally ready to laugh, and laugh long and hard, at Nazis and Hitler, but in the go-go 1960s his heart and sensibility still seemed to be on a Catskill stage many decades earlier.
1973’s Blazing Saddles was famously fearless and provocative in its treatment of race and sex and language, to the point where think pieces are continually written about how a movie like that could never get made in our delicate, hyper-sensitive era. It bears mentioning, however, that when Blazing Saddles was released in the thick of the New Hollywood renaissance of the late 1960s and 1970s, the Western was only slightly more modern and contemporary than the cinematic era Brooks paid homage to in his joyful 1976 Hollywood comedy Silent Movie.
The idea of making a throwback to the teens and twenties at a time when Hollywood was focussing on the ills and angst of the times with unparalleled intensity and seriousness is so Mel Brooks that I was a little surprised to discover the film’s story credited solely to distinguished gagman Ron Clark. But if Brooks didn’t conceive the film’s story, every other aspect of the film has his fingerprints all over it. Brooks even shares a first name and a profession with his character. In the role he was born to play, Brooks stars as Mel Funn, a hotshot Hollywood director whose career crashed and burned after he got hooked on the sauce.
A newly sober Funn pegs his comeback hopes on an audacious idea. With the help of sidekicks/associates/partners-in-having-silly-names Marty Eggs (Marty Feldman) and Dom Bell (Dom Deluise), Funn wants to make a silent movie. The head of a failing movie studio (Sid Caeser, Brooks old Your Show of Shows boss and mentor) agrees to make the movie on the condition that these three survivors manage to trick the biggest movie stars in Hollywood into appearing in it.
like this guy!
This leads to a memorable series of set-pieces that gently, genially poke fun at the personas and excesses of some of the biggest movie stars of the day while also lovingly stroking their egos. Paul Newman, for example, gently sends up his persona as a virile movie star who loved to race cars in his spare time. You know, when he wasn’t raising a fortune for charity through his beloved and delicious line of food products or involved in activism.
Newman is funny and game in Silent Movie, but he’s also Paul Newman-cool and Paul Newman-handsome. The other cameos are almost as flattering, without killing the comedy. DeLuise’s good buddy Burt Reynolds plays himself as a preening narcissist who can never resist the allure of a nearby mirror and/or other reflective surface, for example, but he also looks fantastic, like the perennial World’s Sexiest Man candidate he was at the time.
As befits a movie where much of the cast consists of famous people playing fictionalized versions of themselves, Silent Movie is full of meta aspects and in-jokes. Anne Bancroft, Brooks’ real-life wife, is among the cavalcade of big stars being sought out for the film-within-a-film. She’s introduced overseeing a harem of snazzily dressed studs like a late-period Mae West, only less sad and heartbreaking, and dances lustily with the movie’s trio of wildly gesticulating goofballs in a standout sequence that perfectly embodies the movie’s breezy charm and almost musical sense of rhythm and pacing.
No one was better qualified to ether orchestrate or perform this seductive samba of silliness than Brooks. DeLuise is at his best here but I couldn’t help but fantasy-cast Gene Wilder in the role, particularly since he exhibited such amazing chemistry with Feldman in Young Frankenstein.
When you’re as unique looking as Feldman, the natural instinct is to play self-deprecating and meek, as if to preemptively apologize to the universe for straying so far from the norm. Like Curtis Armstrong in Better Off Dead, Feldman goes in the opposite direction here, giving the character the demented swagger of someone who isn’t about to let anything get in the way of his myopic self-conception as a bedroom-eyed ladies’ man forever on the make.
Silent Movie is a delightful valentine to old Hollywood and comedy history so orthodox and traditional in its sensibility that it actually brings back Henny Youngman for its requisite, “Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup” gag. Silent Movie is a lovingly curated museum of mothballed but wonderful old bits. There’s even a good stretch towards the end where seemingly all the jokes are rooted in the time-tested vaudeville conceit that “comically oversized” equals “automatically hilarious.”
Brooks’ lovable throwback also recycles one of my all-time favorite gags, where three men (Brooks, Feldman and DeLuise) are stacked one atop another in a trench coat to create the illusion of being one suspiciously tall man. It’s a time-tested comic conceit most brilliantly parodied on Bojack Horseman.
Brooks, DeLuise and Feldman are all in their element. These three unapologetic hams delight in being in a context where it is almost impossible to go too broad, to be too corny or old-fashioned. They are an inspired team whose chemistry goes a long way towards making this a dizzy, featherweight romp a wonderfully sustained goof.
Silent Movie is less a parody of the pre-talkie era than a riotous celebration of the silent screen, one that makes the most of its one word of dialogue in the famous gag where legendary mime Marcel Marceau braves one of those wind-tunnels mimes are always struggling against to answer Funn’s request that he lend his silent presence to the proceedings with a spoken “Non!”
Silent Movie fits in perfectly with Brooks’ 1970s. Brooks cemented his legend as one of the biggest and most foolproof comic voices of an uncertain and incendiary present with a string of movies (1970’s The Twelve Chairs, 1974’s Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, 1976’s Silent Movie and 1978’s High Anxiety) rooted in a deep understanding and love for pop-culture’s past.
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