“Once a week, I had to”: the movie Mel Brooks was forced to watch “thousands of times”
If there’s a movie you really love, then there’s absolutely nothing wrong with watching it as many times as you want. While Mel Brooks is a confessed fan of a 1940s classic, he didn’t necessarily have a choice after being forced into revisiting it on a weekly basis by his best friend.
Having first crossed paths on Your Show of Shows, the variety series that gave both of them their break in the industry, Brooks and Carl Reiner were virtually inseparable until the latter’s death in June 2020 at the age of 98. Every week, they’d gather around the TV at one of their homes and watch films, with some making more appearances than others.
The EGOT-winning icon behind The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Spaceballs revealed that he and Reiner would watch Ridley Scott’s Gladiator every single week without fail, and viewing habits covered everything from game shows like Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune to George Clooney and Nicole Kidman’s thunderously forgettable 1997 action thriller, The Peacemaker.
The veteran duo had a highly specific and somewhat unusual set of rules for what constituted a picture worth watching, but Mervyn LeRoy’s sweeping 1942 romantic drama, Random Harvest, didn’t involve any perimeters being secured or one character telling another to get some rest. Still, Reiner was borderline obsessed with it, and Brooks had no choice but to go along with his pal’s demands.
“Once a week, I had to watch Random Harvest with Ronald Colman,” he told The New York Times. “Carl always said, ‘If you don’t cry watching the end, you’re not alive.'” Seeing as Brooks is currently 99 years old and has his eyes on turning 100 in June 2026, maybe his weekly check-ins with the film have been doing him more good than he realises.
Nominated for seven Academy Awards without winning any of them, Random Harvest stars Colman as an amnesiac war veteran and Greer Garson as his wife, who attempts to reunite with her husband and remind him of the life they once shared. The ending brings them back together, and Brooks wasn’t the only one Reiner wanted to experience the tearjerking finale in near-perpetuity.
“Carl Reiner kept playing the movie once a week,” he recalled to Ben Mankiewicz. “And he said, ‘If you find somebody on the street that hasn’t seen it, bring them in. I just want to see them break down and cry’. It makes me cry, too. I’ve seen it a thousand times, and it makes me cry.”
Regardless of whether it happened, that creates the unusual mental image of Brooks bounding out of either he or Reiner’s home and harassing passers-by on the street to ask if they’ve seen Random Harvest, before forcibly dragging them indoors if they say they haven’t and then patiently watching them during the final reel to see if it brings them to tears, although that does raise the question of what their fate would be if they didn’t.
He’s seen it more times than he would like and shed plenty of tears along the way, but at Reiner’s urging, Brooks couldn’t escape Random Harvest as part of his weekly schedule.
