The Best Adventure Movies: Blazing Saddles

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Outside Magazine, June 2005

Outside Goes to the Movies
A Perfect 10
Blazing Saddles

By Steven Kotler & The Editors

10. Blazing Saddles (1974)
If ever a genre needed levity, it was the Hollywood western, and only Mel Brooks is twisted enough to stock a riotous parody with Yiddish-speaking Indians and still make it work. Sinister developers, hoping to push a railroad line through the middle of a frontier town, try to run off its feebleminded citizens by sending in a brute squad and (gasp!) a black sheriff. Cleavon Little plays Sheriff Bart, a 1970s funksploitation hero stuck in the podunk prairie of the 19th century. Gene Wilder, as the Waco Kid, is Bart's de facto deputy, a drunken gunslinger who's "killed more men than Cecil B. DeMille." The famous sight (and sound) gags—the beans scene, the man-child Mongo knocking a horse out with one punch—are beyond excessive. Though some of the bigoted cursing makes you squirm, it's supposed to, and Brooks aimed his sharpest barbs at the racists. "These are people of the land," says the Waco Kid, describing to Bart why the townsfolk can't accept him. "The common clay of the New West. You know—morons."

Next Page: From Tarzan and Bogie to Spicoli and Depp, a look at the rise of cinema's indestructible action archetype

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