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Mel Brooks on Alfred Hitchcock means a Borscht Belter's bright flatness for a visionary's obsessive mise en scène, "loud and annoying" is the directive. (Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker do benefit from "a dramatic airport," though.) Antics at The Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous, Spellbound but also Minnelli's The Cobweb, the newest staff member is the filmmaker as the Nobel laureate whose middle name is Harpo. Sadistic nurse (Cloris Leachman) and masochistic doctor (Harvey Korman) welcome him, then relish a bit of private therapy. "Too much bondage! Not enough discipline!" The psychiatrist's Vertigo is exacerbated at the top of the convention building, he hugs the walls and requests a newspaper, Barry Levinson as the vexed bellboy makes a stabbing delivery in the Psycho shower. "A Mr. MacGuffin called..." Hitchcock's assertive syntax gives rise to the best gag—the camera tracks in toward the dinner room until it shatters the window, the characters stare as it retreats sheepishly. (Diegetic sound gets its own steamroller, the sudden burst of Herrmannesque music that punctuates the words "foul play" turns out to be an orchestra in the bus driving by.) The dread of authority from The Wrong Man is a feint for a swishy flasher, the fowl rampage from The Birds leaves a guano-stained hero. When tied to tepid homage, Brooks is as straitjacketed as Truffaut in The Bride Wore Black; when freed, he launches into a sensational burlesque of Sinatra's hyper-nonchalance to serenade the hot-cold blonde (Madeline Kahn as Madeleine Carroll as Gene Wilder). The chase hinges on Blowup unexpectedly more than North by Northwest, a flashback out of The Nutty Professor triggers the breakthrough in the tower: "It's not height I'm afraid of—it's parents!" De Palma in Raising Cain shows how it's done. With Ron Carey, Dick Van Patten, Howard Morris, Charlie Callas, Rudy De Luca, and Robert Ridgely.
--- Fernando F. Croce |