Blazing Saddles: Critic Reviews

Blazing Saddles has no dominant personality, and it looks as if it includes every gag thought up in every story conference. Whether good, bad, or mild, nothing was thrown out.

It's a crazed grabbag of a movie that does everything to keep us laughing except hit us over the head with a rubber chicken.

One of the funniest awful movies ever made.

Although Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder head a uniformly competent cast, pic is handily stolen by Harvey Korman and Madeline Kahn. Kahn is simply terrific doing a Marlene Dietrich lampoon.

Goldarned if the whole fool enterprise is not worth the attention of any moviegoer with a penchant for what one actor, commenting on another's Gabby Hayes imitation, calls 'authentic western gibberish.'

Kids may not get all of Brooks' Old West parody.

A lewd spoof of westerns and racial prejudice; enough laughs to cover the fact that it is, essentially, a stupid movie.

It's tough to beat as an outrageously phlegmy deposit in Hollywood's spittoon.

The screenplay is credited to five writers, and it shows in the confused melange of styles.

I laughed and laughed while viewing this again. Maybe part of it was nostalgia, but part of it came from a refreshing feeling of being shocked once more.

...at once a parody of old Western movies and a social satire on race and prejudice.

Madeline Kahn was nominated for the Supporting Actress Oscar for her wonderful parody of all the cabaret singers that Dietrich used to play, including the comedy-Western Destry Rides Again.

Chalk up Blazing Saddles as only a lampoon of Hollywood westerns and you miss the point by a Texas mile.... Its humor is the palliative that lets Brooks mock prejudices and, with gloves off, prejudiced people.

Whacked out and brilliant. Eminently rewatchable.

Still good for a few chuckles, but I find it somewhat overrated.

Somehow the raunchy humor seemed to pass me by.

The funniest Mel Brooks film, Clevevon Little, who died far too young, is a comic genius. With the success of The Producers on Broadway maybe we can expect a stage version of Saddles which I'd pay good money to see.

Hilarious, irreverant western spoof. One of Mel Brooks' best.

Brooks' wholehearted embracing of rank vulgarity, together with his innovative quickfire sketch structure, titillated crowds more used to sophisticated Hollywood humour.

Truth be told, Young Frankenstein holds up far better... [but] that's not to infer that this Western spoof doesn't deliver its share of hilarity.

A limp, shapeless mess of a film trades in a genuine respect for westerns' tropes for purile vulgarity and joy-buzzer showmanship.