High Anxiety movie review & film summary (1978)
Take, for example, a moment when dramatic music overwhelms the sound track while Brooks and his chauffeur are driving down a Los Angeles freeway. They look at each other, puzzled, and then we see the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra performing in a bus in the next lane. Sure, he's pulled the same gag before (Count Basie turning up in the desert in "Blazing Saddles"), but it still works.
Another Brooks specialty that works again this time is the casting of Cloris Leachman in variations of a neo-Nazi sadist. In "Young Frankenstein," she was Frau Blucher, whose very name made horses whinny with fright. Now she's Nurse Diesel, sinister presence at the Institute for the Very, Very Nervous, where Brooks has been hired as the new director. She has a closet full of whips and chains, and walks around as if her nurse's uniform covered a cast-iron corset. It's funny ... but because it comes from Brooks and Leachman, not because it has much to do with Hitchcock.
Here's an example of why Hitchcock is so spoof-proof. At the end of "High Anxiety," a victim dangles from the top of a tower for what seems like minutes on end, hanging at times by a single leg. Brooks is having fun with the way Hitchcock plays with his scenes of climactic violence. Fine. But remember Hitchcock's wonderful 1972 movie "Frenzy"? There's that strangling in it that goes on and on and on, played very straight, until we finally realize that Hitchcock is slyly giving us our money's worth by playing with the scene beyond all the possibilities of realism.
Brooks has made a specialty of movie satires: "Blazing Saddles," "Young Frankenstein," and "Silent Movie." But they took on well-chosen targets. It's one thing to kid the selfconscious seriousness of a Western or a horror movie. It's another to take on a director of such sophistication that half the audience won't even get the in-jokes the other half is laughing at.
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