Mel Brooks names the eight greatest scenes of his career: “A vision realised beyond belief”
There’s nothing wrong with an actor and filmmaker wanting to pat themselves on the back for a job well done, so Mel Brooks was well within his rights to name eight scenes as the greatest of his storied career, even though he was only asked for five.
When you’ve been around as long as he has, with the actor, comedian, producer, and filmmaker’s 100th birthday approaching, it becomes harder to play favourites. He’s been there, seen it, done it, and gotten enough t-shirts to last a lifetime, and Brooks has always been fond of saluting his own contributions to cinema.
As an EGOT winner responsible for several of the greatest comedies ever made, who’s going to deny him? If he wants to say that Young Frankenstein is the definition of onscreen perfection, then he’s allowed to. Sure, he’s being biased because he wrote, produced, and directed the film, but he was also banned from appearing as an on-camera character by Gene Wilder, who wouldn’t make it if Brooks was a cast member.
Since it’s his only “perfect” movie, according to its creator, he couldn’t restrain himself to a solitary scene from Young Frankenstein. Instead, he opted for the unforgettable ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’ sequence, which he called “a magic moment,” and shoehorned in Cloris Leachman’s ‘He was my boyfriend’ as his second.
“It was an incredible scene,” he surmised to the Los Angeles Times, with his Hitchcockian parody, High Anxiety, being the other film responsible for containing two of Brooks’ two favourite scenes. “Barry Levinson stabbing me in the shower with a rolled-up newspaper,” was the first, and “the second thing was actually me singing the title song to Madeline [Kahn] at the bar. I thought I did that very well!”
As for the one-and-done flicks, it wouldn’t be complete without The Producers: “Leo Bloom, played by Gene Wilder, has a hysterical fit when Bialystock, played by Zero Mostel, takes his blue blanket and goes bananas.” Brooks knew it would be funny, but he “never could have imagined it going over the top like it did,” calling the exchange “a vision realised beyond belief.”
Much like The Producers, Blazing Saddles was another movie nobody in Hollywood wanted to make, with Kahn occupying another spot among Brooks’ greatest-ever moments. Calling her “the best actress/comedienne/singer who ever lived,” her rendition of ‘I’m Tired’ left him “stunned by her incredible music talent and her comedy.”
Keeping things close to home, Brooks and his wife, Anne Bancroft’s duet on ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ in To Be or Not to Be is the only one of his favourite scenes that he didn’t direct himself, but because the couple “really worked on it” and “had a tutor come from UCLA who taught us every Polish word” to ensure they could pull it off in Alan Johnson’s wartime caper, he remembers it fondly.
Last, and probably least, seeing as it was a critical and commercial dud that Brooks still declared as the best screen acting he’d ever done, his “gorgeously staged” dance with Lesley Ann Warren in Life Stinks, which he made a point of calling an “overlooked” picture, rounded out the legendary performer’s choice cuts from his illustrious back catalogue.
They may not necessarily be everyone’s picks for the greatest scenes of Mel Brooks’ career, but since he’s Mel Brooks, his opinion carries more weight than anyone else’s.
