Make It Funny; Make It Huge: 'Mel Brooks Collection'

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MEL BROOKS WAS a TV writer for 20 years before he made his first movie, but the small screen never really suited him. He needed a big canvas for his broad, manic comedies, as his 1968 debut, "The Producers," attested. That career-making movie is oddly absent from the new "Mel Brooks Collection," an affectionately curated set that includes nine of Brooks' 12 movies on new Blu-Ray discs. The extras are generous, but the biggest thrill is watching these movies back-to-back in this new format.

Brooks was that rare thing in Hollywood: a comic auteur whose films possessed a distinctive humor as well as a witty, often grand-scale visual style. On Blu-Ray, his early films look crisp and lively: His attention to architectural detail gives "The Twelve Chairs" a broad color palette, while the aerial shots give "High Anxiety" its queasily vertiginous feel. In fact, "The Mel Brooks Collection" may be the best argument yet for upgrading from DVD.

Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, Brooks was a director on a mission — to right certain wrongs through humor and to render ugly history as hilarious satire. In "History" the Spanish Inquisition becomes a song-and-dance routine that undercuts the event's violent anti-Semitism. Similarly, Hitler is portrayed as the ultimate buffoon in "To Be or Not to Be," and in the underrated "Twelve Chairs," post-revolution Soviet Russia becomes the perfect setting for an incisive dissection of class and culture.

In this regard, "Blazing Saddles" is Brooks' finest and weightiest accomplishment, even if it plays like light comedy. By setting up a black man as sheriff of a white town in the Old West, the director playfully picks at the scabs of race in America, with actor Cleavon Little delivering his punchlines with a sly, knowing smile.

If "The Mel Brooks Collection" tells a story, it is perhaps one of sad decline, as it ends with two of Brooks' worst movies: "Spaceballs" and "Robin Hood: Men in Tights," which both tediously emphasize laborious set-ups over clever punchlines.

But seven out of nine? As any of Brooks' characters might say, Eh, not so bad.

Written by Express contributor Stephen Deusner
Photo courtesy First Run Features