My life changed in 1974. Blazing Saddles came out. And hit the screens with a bang, a crash and an oy-vey! No-one had ever seen anything like it before. Ok, I’d never seen anything like it before. The world learned of Mel Brooks. And of the redefinition of irreverence.

Blazing Saddles attacked every stereotype in Western movies. They had a black sheriff, and consequently employed the ‘n-word’ with abandon throughout. There were Native Americans (red indians, as they were known) who spoke yiddish. There were shit-head red-necks galore, dirty dealers, ballroom whores and baked-bean eaters who farted. And farted. And farted.

And an alcoholic gunslinger played by Gene Wilder.

Who’s role really was to add a subtlety to what would otherwise have been a very good but undiluted slapstick-fest. And their lay the genius of both Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder.

A few years later, even though it had come out a few years earlier but no-one bothered to show it, I saw the Producers. And my life changed again. (Yeah, my life changed a lot back then, pretty much with every movie I saw, every book I read, every girl I passed at the bus-stop). The Producers remains to this day My Favourite Film. There, I’ve said it. I’ve finally reached the zenith of my lifelong equivocation over best movies. The Producers wins. And the Blues Brothers. Play it again, Sam. And Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Gene Wilder was one of The Producers. Playing the nebachy Jewish, panic-attacky mother’s boy accountant (Mel Brooks loves a sterotype like no-one else), the straight man to the comic tour de force that was Zero Mostell; the other Producer. The perfect film. Based on a brilliantly clever ploy (that if a musical production loses money, you don’t have to give back the sponsor’s money; even if you’ve sold 650% of the costs), the two finest of comic talents, ably accompanied by the incredible Dick Strawn as Hitler, and their chosen production that ‘had to fail’; Springtime for Hitler. So brilliant. So Mel Brooks. So Gene Wilder.

Wilder also starred in a film that no-one ever saw, other than me, because I was already ‘his biggest fan’. It was called The Frisco Kid and looking back, it was a bit Mel Brooks derivative but only because it had Gene Wilder and a silly plot. About a Polish rabbi (Wilder) crossing all of America in ‘cowboy days’ and applying the black-hat values of the shtetl to the wild west. Very funny, very Gene Wilder.

When he died yesterday a legend left this world. But left it a much happier and funnier place than we he arrived.

RIP

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx