Mel Brooks is an uneven comic genius. He can have you falling helplessly around the room - well, that was the effect the other night when we watched his brilliant The Producers on DVD - or he can leave you bored and indifferent - that's the effect Blazing Saddles has on me.
But then there's Silent Movie. This is in a genre of its own. Mel Brooks plays ex-drunkard director Mel Funn, who has the brilliant idea of resuscitating his career and saving a near-defunct movie studio by producing the first silent movie in 40 years.
He has the concept. Now all he and his two sidekicks Marty Egg (Marty Feldman) and Dom Bell (Dom DeLuise) have to do is recruit the stars who'll carry the project through to silent acclaim.
This IS a silent movie, complete with dialogue cards and atmospheric music. There's only one spoken word in the entire film - and I won't spoil the gag by telling you who utters it. Mel goes after the cream of Hollywood - most of the film is spent chasing after Burt Reynolds, James Caan, Liza Minnelli, Paul Newman and Mel's screen goddess, Anne Bancroft.
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The film is a series of short sight gags - one of the best being a very wet recruitment scene with Burt Reynolds. It's a film best viewed in discrete bursts of 15 or 20 minutes at a time - longer than that is just too much at once. But it's one of the rare movies which had me laughing out loud pretty continually - not even Mel Gibson's latest comedy The Life of Christ managed that!
Silent Movie might lack the total edge in inspired politically incorrect lunacy compared to The Producers, but you can say the same about most movies, even Scorsese's latest effort Streets of New York. This Silent Movie is fully worth the script it's not written on. It's very very funny - one of Mel's best.
This is a very sound anamorphic transfer; with good definition and black tones and no evident print wear.
There is no colour fading; it seems to have been taken from a freshly-struck print.
This can be returned to for favourite scenes time and time again. It's a keeper, up on the shelf with Brooks' all-time masterpiece, The Producers.
