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The mythical frontier, sacred cows for cattle: "Piss on you, I'm working for Mel Brooks!" The Old West burg stands in the way of the dastardly railroad baron (Harvey Korman), his henchman's suggestion of killing every first-born male child is dismissed as "too Jewish," a new sheriff is the answer. Enter Black Bart (Cleavon Little) with his Gucci saddlebags, heralded by a prairie panorama of Count Basie's orchestra. "What's a dazzling suburbanite like you doing in a rustic setting like this?" Manifest destiny à la Little Big Man (the Yiddish Sioux points the way), the alky ally (Gene Wilder) was once the Waco Kid. You have to know how to be vulgar, says Picasso, a Termite Terrace abandon gets to the bottom of the genre's quicksand of bigotry. Brooks leaves no stone unturned, the campfire by moonlight gets illuminated by intestinal fireworks. (The flatuliste tribute extends to the governor named Le Petomane, played by the filmmaker as "the leading asshole in the state.") The Bavarian Bombshell out of Destry Rides Again, lisped to perfection by Madeline Kahn with a song about the toll of love, "everything below the waist is kaput!" The ebony hipster has no luck with morons until he vanquishes the gargantuan dimwit (Alex Karras), an invocation of Randolph Scott's holy name clinches the alliance. (The fallen foe poignantly declares his lot in a Leone close-up: "Mongo only pawn in game of life.") Vigo's cabinet of dummies for the bogus town, the bunch of marauders (including banditos, Hell's Angels, Klansmen and Nazi soldiers) are outsmarted by a tollbooth in the desert. And then it simply shifts, like Buñuel going to church at the end of The Exterminating Angel, into a pansy musical directed by Dom DeLuise. Ferreri is felicitously concurrent with Don't Touch the White Woman! With Slim Pickens, Burton Gilliam, David Huddleston, Liam Dunn, John Hillerman, George Furth, Jack Starrett, Carol Arthur, and Robyn Hilton.
--- Fernando F. Croce |