The thing is, it\u2019s also a deeply moral movie that uses these things to call out the racism and violent hypocrisy undergirding America\u2019s most cherished frontier myths. Blazing Saddles<\/em> is as powerful a revisionist Western as Unforgiven<\/em> or Little Big Man<\/em>, it just happens to be incredibly silly about it. Cleavon Little stars as a day laborer sentenced to hang after walloping his foreman (Slim Pickens) with a shovel. Railroad baron Hedley LaMarr (Harvey Korman) wants to clear out the town of Rock Ridge to make way for his train line, and when his gang of hired thugs can\u2019t kill, rape, and run the people off fast enough, he bamboozles the corrupt, nitwit governor (director Brooks, in one of four roles) into appointing our condemned hero as the West\u2019s first Black sheriff. That ought to scare them away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite being greeted with nothing but hostility and slurs from the local townfolk, Bart does his duty and protects the people of Rock Ridge from Hedley\u2019s vicious goon squad. He enlists the help of the Waco Kid, a drunken gunfighter played with bone-dry wit by Brooks\u2019 regular accomplice Gene Wilder. The comic actor was a last-minute replacement for actual movie cowboy and real-life alcoholic Gig Young, who according to Brooks, showed up and vomited on his first day of shooting. (\u201cI\u2019m not directing The Exorcist<\/em>,\u201d the filmmaker quipped. Brooks says he\u2019d previously offered the role to John Wayne, who turned it down because the movie was too dirty. Given the Duke\u2019s politics, I can\u2019t imagine he was as enthusiastic about the script as the filmmaker claims.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHere we take the good time and trouble to slaughter every last Indian in the West, and for what? So they can appoint a sheriff that’s blacker’n any Indian!\u201d bemoans Pickens\u2019 peckerwood henchman, sending up his roles in a thousand early Hollywood Westerns. The illicit-feeling thrill of Blazing Saddles<\/em> lies in how bluntly such ugly American truths are stated, the equivalent of \u201csaying the quiet part out loud\u201d amid a barrage of surreal sight gags, Borscht Belt schtick, vaudevillian cavorting and the undisputed champion of movie fart jokes. One of the film\u2019s five credited screenwriters was Richard Pryor, whom Brooks credits with giving him permission to push the racial humor into increasingly edgy territory. This was around the same time Pryor released an album called \u201cThat Nigger\u2019s Crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n The comedian was Brooks\u2019 first choice to play Sheriff Bart, but Warner Bros. didn\u2019t want to trust the lead role to an untested up-and-comer whose drug issues weren\u2019t exactly a well-kept secret. Little gives a warm, ingratiating performance, but he\u2019s got a surprising lack of chemistry with Wilder, who seems off in a loopy movie of his own during their jailhouse bonding scenes. (Watching the film again recently was the first time I realized how much Ryan Gosling\u2019s comic persona is indebted to Wilder.) It\u2019s tough not to wonder what Pryor might have done with the part, especially considering how well he and Wilder wound up working together in films that were nowhere near as good as this one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Blazing Saddles<\/em> is about how racism is the idiotic ideology of pig-ignorant buffoons who have done nothing but hinder this country\u2019s progress since its earliest days. This is the kind of message that solemn, prestige pictures pretend is some kind of revelation they\u2019re piously delivering to audiences in need of enlightenment. Brooks simply takes it as a given and has fun with it. It\u2019s a movie full of childish humor, but it treats you like an adult. The jokes are all at the expense of characters Wilder\u2019s Waco Kid reminds us \u201care just simple farmers, people of the land, the common clay of the new West. You know, morons.\u201d Brooks once said that his movies rise below vulgarity. After all, this is the man who brought you \u201cSpringtime for Hitler\u201d a mere 22 years after WWII ended. He\u2019s not exactly precious about things. (The Producers<\/em> was historically closer to Adolf Hitler\u2019s defeat than we are now from the final episode of Friends.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The film\u2019s frequent fourth-wall breaks eventually topple it altogether, with the action spilling out onto the Warner Bros. backlot where the movie is being filmed. It\u2019s not enough that the country\u2019s foundational myths are mocked with the sight of a man punching a horse, Brooks also explodes the Hollywood artifice of these stories America tells itself. The Dada-esque sight of Sheriff Bart and the Waco kid walking into a movie theater to see how their story ends is topped a few minutes later, when Bart\u2019s noble \u201cfor your consideration\u201d speech about justice is interrupted by the crowd literally calling B.S. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s amusing to see how gingerly Blazing Saddles<\/em> is handled by critics and academics these days. The version currently streaming on HBO Max is preceded by a skittish introduction from a TCM host placing the film in historical context. Whenever it screens at rep theaters, warnings and disclaimers abound. I always assumed the movie’s righteous intentions were so obvious as to be self-evident. But I suppose one should never underestimate the common clay of the new West.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Blazing Saddles” is streaming on HBO Max<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/blazing_saddles-1024x577.webp\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n