Word: frankenstein
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WATCHING Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks's newest movie, is like being tickled to death for two hours. In some places it works and in some places it doesn't, but when it does you're absolutely helpless. Brooks's style is characteristically high-pitched and hypertense, but his mocking glance is actually so loving and his techniques often so predictable and familiar that the effect is surprisingly soothing. This is a good movie to see when you're washed out, overworked, and don't want to think anymore. This is a good movie to see this month...
Brooks went back to the '30s ostensibly looking for a sci-fi classic to spoof, and got carried away. At first he appears to be parodying the original Dr. Frankenstein, made forty years ago. In fact, he takes his original material quite seriously and treats it with respect. He has to; he's not only getting story, structure and characters gratis, but he's getting a perfect medium for parody of a much broader scope. Dr. Frankenstein was a first, a great film, which provoked a rash of science fiction movies over the next decade or so that decreased...
Gene Wilder, who co-wrote the screenplay, plays the wild-eyed, wild-haired grandson of the Baron von Frankenstein in a brilliant, highly personal take-off on the familiar character of the mad genius. He begins the movie as an American neurosurgeon frantically embarrassed by his ancestor's antiscientific shenanigans. Forced to journey to Transylvania to receive the Baron's will, he discovers the ancient laboratory and is seduced by his grandfather's dreams--providing the set-up for a spoof of every major scene in the original film, interrupted by the tangents of Brooks's imagination and concluded...
...Frankenstein's monster is Peter Boyle (Joe), an actor wonderfully deft at being clumsy. The movie galvanizes just about the time of his appearance. Boyle shows up in, and helps make work, the two sharpest scenes: an encounter with a blind hermit (Gene Hackman, doing a dexterous comic cameo), in which the monster is assaulted by the hermit's well-intentioned blundering; and a brief foray into show biz, in which Frankenstein and his creation put on a fractured vaudeville. Brooks is always at his best making fun of the delicious stupidities of popular entertainment (recall Springtime...
...madder, funnier, more inspired than anything being done in movies today, including the rather coddled comedy of Woody Allen. Brooks must also have got tired of people telling him what a maladroit technician he has been, and he has taken some pains to correct that failing here. Young Frankenstein is his best-crafted film so far. It contains uniformly excellent performances, among which Madeline Kahn's delicate but libidinous fiancee ranks high...