also parodied throughout the film, but a striking amount of its humor
derives from the manipulation of racial stereotypes that have little or noth-
ing to do with the West (but everything to do with the movies). Thus Blaz-
ing Saddles is considerably more deliberate than the “raunchy, protracted
version of a television comedy skit” that Variety found it to be, but it scarcely
dealt a death blow to the western, as some critics have charged (Elly 981).
(In fact, the reverse could be argued, since its $47.8 million in box office
receipts made it the most financially successful western of all time [Bus-
comb 251].) Brooks’s other sensational parody was Young Frankenstein, a
send-up of 1930s Universal horror films (as well as studio-era biopics like
MGM’s Young Tom Edison [1940])—specifically James Whale’s Frankenstein
(1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Rowland V. Lee’s Son of Franken-
stein (1939)—that managed to achieve a nearly perfect balance between
parody and homage. In cinematography, lighting, and set design, in fact,
Brooks sustained an atmosphere of brooding horror that honored the orig-
inal films, even as the dialogue made mincemeat of their hoary plot con-
ventions. Like Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein did terrific box office,
earning nearly $39 million, and Brooks suddenly found himself the writer/
director of the second and third highest grossing films of the year.
The advertising slogan for Blazing Saddles was “never give a saga an
even break,” and that was surely the impulse behind most generic revision
formulas of the 1970s, although Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers was
slightly more reverential of its saga than most. One of many prior and sub-
sequent adaptations of Alexander Dumas’s classic novel, this film was shot
concurrently with its sequel The Four Musketeers (1975) as a single continu-
ous film, but they were released in the United States separately (which led
to a lawsuit by some of the principals, who were paid for only one film).
Lester’s New Wave style worked perfectly to exaggerate and parody the
conventions of the swashbuckler, a revision that brought the form closer to
slapstick comedy than to adventure. Peter Yates’s For Pete’s Sake (Colum-
bia/Rastar), shot by master Hungarian cinematographer László Kovács, was
a reworking of screwball comedy conventions from the 1930s, similar in
many ways to Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc? (1972) in that both used
Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby (1938) as a subtext and starred Barbra
Streisand in the Katharine Hepburn role. Other successful comedies were
The Longest Yard, Freebie and the Bean, and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, all of
which could be fairly described as R-rated comedies of male bonding, in
effect buddy films. Shot on location in a Georgia prison, The Longest Yard is
about a prison football team that manages to subvert the system when it
plays a game against the guards’ team; one-third of the film is devoted to
1974 — MOVIES AND POLITICAL TRAUMA 129