Director
(Born 1926)
Dvds | Videos | To Be or Not to Be | Gene Wilder
Director, Producer, Actor & Writer
Filmography - Director
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.
clark gable
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alfred hitchcock |
robert montgomery
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robert donat
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grace kelly
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conrad veidt
Melvin Kaminsky
b. Brooklyn, 1926
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.
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.
mel brooks
dvds | videos
humphrey bogart
|
howard hawks
|
frank capra
|
charlie chaplin
|
lauren bacall
|
fritz lang
jean harlow |
greta garbo |
ava gardner |
audrey hepburn |
edward g. robinson
|
john garfield
erich von stroheim
|
wim wenders
|
madeleine carroll
|
marlene dietrich
|
rita hayworth
|
margaret lockwood
dvds | videos
clark gable
|
alfred hitchcock |
robert montgomery
|
robert donat
|
grace kelly
|
conrad veidt
mel brooks
humphrey bogart
|
howard hawks
|
frank capra
|
charlie chaplin
|
lauren bacall
|
fritz lang
jean harlow |
greta garbo |
ava gardner |
audrey hepburn |
edward g. robinson
|
john garfield
erich von stroheim
|
wim wenders
|
madeleine carroll
|
marlene dietrich
|
rita hayworth |
margaret lockwood
Page created by: lenin@netcomuk.co.uk
Changes last made: 2004