Young Frankenstein
Truly great comedies are the ones you watch when you are low. When you feel like crying, they do this astonishing thing of making you giggle. They make you feel warm during the winter months and they take make the world colourful in a black and white world. Funnily enough, it is a black and white picture that I’ve turned to this harsh December month, to make shake off the feeling of death and bring life back into my bones. It is the ever classic and the ever brilliant, Young Frankenstein. And like the best ones, it is a movie that hits every time you watch it.
Moving on from Blazing Saddles, the epic western farce, Mel Brooks teamed up with Gene Wilder again for this caper. Young Frankenstein follows the antics of distant relative Frederick Frankenstein (that’s Fronk-en-steen, by the way.) As a Doctor at an American Medical School, he gets a summons to travel to Transylvania as he has inherited the estate. Completely against his families work about bringing the dead back to life, Frederick alongside new friends Igor and Inga soon give in to the curiosity of playing God. Alongside comedian Marty Feldman and actor Peter Boyle, Young Frankenstein is a classic piece of comedy cold.
Young Frankenstein, in similar vein to Airplane, is how spoofs should be done. Ignore the latest whirlwind of spoof films from recent Starving Games or The 41 Year Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall And Felt Super Bad About It (that last one caused me so much pain, you have no idea.) The reason Young Frankenstein works so well as a spoof is because it is beloved to the original story and movies. Much like the works of Hot Fuzz, Brooks has completely studied the subject inside about out. It doesn’t make the movie to undermine the horror story; but it translates the story, or indeed the Boris Karloff version into a comedic format. With slapstick humour, punchy one liners, repetitive jokes, Brooks reigns in a lot of his wacky side to create a near genius comedy.
It also helps that he has a dazzling lead with Gene Wilder. While most may know him as Willy Wonka or his work with Richard Pryor, his talents seem riotously best here. Taking all the silliness and making it realistic is what Wilder does best. He can really underplay the jokes whiles till being witty but then be outrageous and angrily send you into hysterics. Wilder brings a gravitas to Young Frankenstein that would fall through the hands of lesser actors. As “Fronkonsteen,” he is a charming and surreally intelligent man that at one minute dancing and the next stabbing himself in the leg because he is so enraged. It’s a balance that a lot of thespians have tried to sustain but not as impressive as Wilder.
Young Frankenstein will get you ever time. It will make you laugh out loud, guffaw and chortle. More important, because of its admiration of the original. Using women as actresses instead of just breast jokes too paves a different comedy that unfortunately, films now are still behind on. More importantly, while the jokes may seem juvenile, there are played with astuteness and the stupidity is cleverly planned.
It is more alive than most of the comedies before.
TTFN
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