Word: wildered
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...Anderson's role in Rebecca as the forbidding keeper of the Baron's castle. Young Frankenstein stalks about with the mad intensity and even the cap and cloak of Sherlock Holmes (whose film image dates from the 1930s). "Chattanooga Choo-choo," a popular song of the '30s, resurfaces when Wilder leans out of the train window on arrival and asks, "Is this Transylvania Station?" and is answered by other lines from the same song, "Yes, this is Track 29. Would you like a shoe shine?" The movie is haunted by old ghosts--even Adolf Hitler reappears with a wooden...
...because he takes so seriously the needs they are failing to answer. Just as all art strives to be music, "every organization," Sheed assumes, "strives to be a religion." The true believers signaling wildly inside every American joiner, he concludes, "already wander the streets looking for stranger cults, wilder religions. The more bloodless buy books called You're Really a Terrific Person, desperately making the most of what's left when you lose defining associations." In the end, outside-insiders play prophet rather than reporter and are subject to a certain amount of repetition. Sheed's warnings...
Directed by MEL BROOKS Screenplay by GENE WILDER and MEL BROOKS...
...Mary Shelley's classic. The Shelley story ought to have turned wormy by this time from virtually constant exposure. It is, however, still a powerful myth. One good measure of its resiliency is that even when Brooks is lampooning it, the story remains compelling, nearly inviolate. When Gene Wilder's Dr. Frankenstein tries to zap life into a grotesque, inanimate form, the movie goes serious despite itself. The myth is better, more involving than the jokes being made about...