Every October the old monsters come out to play, and every October there is an argument to be made that the best Frankenstein picture of them all is the one that was played for laughs. Mel Brooks‘ Young Frankenstein opened in December 1974, and more than half a century later it remains that rarest of things, a parody made with so much love for its source that it ends up standing right beside it.
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Go watch it. That’s the verdict, and I’ll spend the rest of this telling you why, but I don’t want you sitting through eight paragraphs wondering whether I’m going to recommend a musical comedy about Hitler.
The Producers (2005) is a movie about two men scheming to produce the biggest flop in Broadway history. It cost forty-five million dollars and took in thirty-eight. Mel Brooks could not have written that ending himself, and God knows he tried everything else.
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Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope opened on May 25, 1977, written and directed by George Lucas, produced by Gary Kurtz, with a score by John Williams that did as much to define the movie’s identity as anything on screen. A desert-planet farmhand named Luke Skywalker, played by Mark Hamill, gets pulled into a galactic rebellion after a droid hides a stolen set of plans inside its memory banks. He falls in with an aging hermit named Obi-Wan Kenobi, played by Alec Guinness, a smuggler named Han Solo, played by Harrison Ford, and a captured rebel leader named Princess Leia, played by Carrie Fisher.
Standing against them is Grand Moff Tarkin, played by Peter Cushing, and his enforcer, Darth Vader. The plot is simple enough to draw on a napkin. Everything interesting happens in how it’s executed.
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High Noon opens on the happiest morning of Marshal Will Kane’s life. Played by Gary Cooper, Kane has just married Amy Fowler, played by Grace Kelly, and turned in his badge, ready to leave the small New Mexico town of Hadleyville behind for a life running a store. Then word arrives at the train station: Frank Miller, the outlaw Kane sent to prison years earlier, has been pardoned and is arriving on the noon train, with three of his old gang already waiting at the depot to meet him. Kane and Amy start to drive out of town. He stops the wagon himself, turns it around, and goes back to face what’s coming.
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Monty Python’s Life of Brian came out in 1979, directed by Terry Jones, written by all six Pythons together, and produced by John Goldstone, with George Harrison quietly saving the whole production by financing it himself after the original studio got cold feet and walked. Graham Chapman plays Brian Cohen, born in the stable next door to a rather more famous baby on the same night, and cursed for the rest of his short life with extraordinarily bad timing. I have loved this film for longer than I can honestly account for, and every time I sit back down with it, I’m struck again by how a movie this silly manages to also be this wise.
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There’s a moment in the King and I when Yul Brynner, playing a king who’s just been told by a schoolteacher that he’s wrong about something, doesn’t yell. He goes still. You watch a man who’s never once been contradicted try to figure out what to do with that feeling. Everyone remembers the big ballroom dance, the hoop skirts, the row of children lined up by height. What you should really watch for is that stillness, because it’s the best thing in the movie, and it’s why this one has held up so much better than most musicals from its era.
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Stanley Kubrick read more than forty books about nuclear war before he made this film, and what he concluded was that nobody really knew anything and the whole situation was absurd. That conclusion is the movie. It is the funniest film ever made about the end of the world, and the most frightening, and sixty years after its release it has not stopped being either one.
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There are war films that show you what war looks like, and there are war films that show you what war does to people. The Bridge on the River Kwai belongs firmly in the second category, which is why it still matters nearly seventy years after David Lean pointed a camera at a river in Ceylon and told some of the finest actors of his generation to go to work.
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