“America had lost the comedy cup”: the two movies that convinced Mel Brooks to get into “the masterpiece business”
Mel Brooks was on a path to restore national pride in comedy.
While it goes without saying that he has directed some of the funniest films ever made, he’s perhaps not given enough credit for kickstarting a new movement within American comedy. Brooks emerged as a writer/director in the 1960s, when the American film industry was facing a decline due to the increased irrelevance of its stars.
While the mannered, screwball sensibilities of that decade’s comedies might have connected with audiences in the ‘40s and ‘50s, it was beginning to feel like the industry had lost its ability to make people laugh. Given that Brooks had experience on television and as a stand-up, he offered new ideas on the type of humour that was current.
He didn’t just seek to make a name for himself, because he saw a larger issue going on with how Hollywood was heading, as he explained, “I had the feeling that America had lost the comedy cup to Britain and to Italy. Lavender Hill Mob, Divorce Italian Style, all those. I thought maybe we could do something about it. I told Sidney, my producer, ‘I don’t want to get into the movie business and make another movie for the late, late show.’ We’re in the masterpiece business, right?”
Brooks identified two of the most important comedies of the previous two decades. The Lavender Hill Mob was a brilliant caper comedy that starred Alec Guinness, in one of his greatest roles, as a mild-mannered clerk at a London bank who hatches a scheme to pull off the ultimate burglary with a team of robbers.
The notion of average people taking fortunes for themselves had never been depicted with such adventurous spirit, and Guinness’ whimsical performance became highly inspirational for the films that would follow, with many classics, such as The Italian Job, Ocean’s Eleven, and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, owing a debt of inspiration to The Lavender Hill Mob.
Divorce, Italian Style was a stark new entry in the modern Italian cinema canon because it moved away from the neorealism movement to tell an absurdist, yet socially satirical story about a man who considers murdering his wife because of laws that banish the act of divorce. Although it’s one of the funniest films of the ‘60s, Divorce, Italian Style was also considered to be a work of great art, and received nominations at the Academy Awards for ‘Best Director’, ‘Best Actor’ and ‘Best Original Screenplay’.
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Brooks’ interest in exclusively making “masterpieces” is among his defining characteristics, because he is not a filmmaker who would churn out new projects on a regular basis just to stack his filmography. Every film that he put his name on was one that he put a tremendous amount of preparation and intention behind, as he wanted each project to say something, in the same way that The Lavender Hill Mob and Divorce, Italian Style did. Brooks’ first film as a director, The Producers, is not that dissimilar from the aforementioned titles, as it also focuses on shady characters trying to pull a con to circumvent the rules.
The two films Brooks cited felt fresh because they were more ‘high concept’ than their contemporaries; Lavender Hill was essentially a crime thriller, and Divorce was a psychological thriller, even though they both had a fair amount of laughs. This flexibility is something that Brooks would maintain throughout all his work.
