(Born 1926)

To Be or Not to Be | Gene Wilder

Director, Producer, Actor & Writer

Melvin Kaminsky
b. Brooklyn, 1926

Filmography - Director

1968: The Producers. 1970: The Twelve Chairs. 1974: Blazing Saddles; Young Frankenstein. 1976: Silent Movie. 1977: High Anxiety. 1981: History of the World—Part I. 1987: Spaceballs. 1991: Life Stinks. 1993: Robin Hood: Men in Tights. 1995: Dracula: Dead and Loving It.


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A besetting handicap of modern comedy is its belief that media conventions and genre take-offs are funnier than human predicaments. The noblest comedians created a character who might have lived and suffered anywhere, without self-consciousness. The events of their comedies are everyday and ordinary. But for Woody Allen and Mel Brooks, humour grows in the hothouse of burlesque. Their own comic attitudes are less subtle and appealing because their clenched personalities are preoccupied with the cliches of entertainment and the task of rip-off parody. With Allen, this may be a substantial loss. But in the case of Brooks, everything suggests a brash, superficial personality dependent on the role of stage schmuck. Nothing shows Brooks's vulgarity more than the reckless idea that Hitchcock merited pastiche. A serious comic would respect fat Alfred for being an inimitable black humorist, far more dainty and piercing than the clumsy efforts of High Anxiety.

Brooks is the product of live-audience TV, hired to write gags for Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows in 1950. For over a decade, he was a script doctor for TV, radio, and stage musicals. In 1964, he did the voice on Ernest Pintoff's cartoon, The Critic. His first two features are his most personal and dangerous works. The Producers has moments of rich bad taste, and its Jewish show-biz angle is all the sharper for having Hitlerism as an opponent and Zero Mostel as its spokesman.

But those early works were too prickly for popular acceptance, and Blazing Saddles was a concession to the masses, devoid of wit or a feeling for Westerns. There is a facetious, mindless desperation grabbing laughs anywhere, anyhow, regardless of the intrinsic amusement of men in cowboy hats always appreciated by the directors of good Westerns. Young Frankenstein has more sense of the horror genre's dignity, and Silent Movie is an unashamed revue, including fine sketches with Burt Reynolds and Brooks's wife, Anne Bancroft. High Anxiety is a disaster: coarse and repetitive and without the shocking malice that Hitchcock employs to make us smile. How could the overdone Cloris Leachman role be funny, nearly forty years after the delicate ambiguity of Mrs. Danvers?

During the 1980s his production company Brooksfilm produced some uncharacteristically serious films, including David Lynch's first commercial feature The Elephant Man (1980), David Cronenberg's first Hollywood shot The Fly (1986), The Doctor and the Devils (1985), 84 Charing Cross Road (1987, a vehicle for Bancroft), and Solarbabies (1986), among others. As an actor, Brooks has appeared in The Muppet Movie (1979), and Sunset People (1984), and lent his voice to Look Who's Talking Too (1990).

After a four-year hiatus, Brooks returned to movies with Life Stinks (1991), in which he starred as a tycoon who spent a month living with the homeless in order to win a bet. The very subject matter of his lackluster comedy made audiences uneasy plus the fact that it was a load of rubbish, albeit mature rubbish from the master of rubbish. Brooks learned his lesson, and returned to parody for his next film, Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993) which was typical Brooks, er, rubbish.