Blazing Saddles (1974) dir. Mel Brooks @ Regal Harbour View

I’ve never watched this in its entirety, just seen a couple scenes. Has some racy humor and some sex jokes (it’s a Mel Brooks movie.) RUNTIME: 93 minutes RATING: R SYNOPSIS: Mel Brooks scored his first commercial hit with this raucous Western spoof starring the late Cleavon Little as the newly hired (and conspicuously black) sheriff of Rock Ridge. Sheriff Bart teams up with deputy Jim (Gene Wilder) to foil the railroad-building scheme of the nefarious Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman). The simple plot is just an excuse for a steady stream of gags, many of them unabashedly tasteless, that Brooks and his wacky cast pull off with side-splitting success. The humor is so juvenile and crude that you just have to surrender to it; highlights abound, from the lunkheaded Alex Karras as the ox-riding Mongo to Madeline Kahn's uproarious send-up of Marlene Dietrich as saloon songstress Lili Von Shtupp. Adding to the comedic excess is the infamous campfire scene involving a bunch of hungry cowboys, heaping servings of baked beans and, well, you get the idea. BLURBS: “For the adult and not easily offended audience for whom Brooks had done this mad frontier frolic, Blazing Saddles offers an extraordinary quantity of unrestrained laughter.” - Charles Champlin, Los Angeles Times “Its genius, then and now, was the manner in which director Mel Brooks and his writers turned a broad Western spoof into what was, for its time, a revolutionary satire of race relations.” - Jason Bailey, Flavorwire “It's a crazed grabbag of a movie that does everything to keep us laughing except hit us over the head with a rubber chicken.” - Roger Ebert