High Anxiety

I'm sorry, dear Reader, but I have never found Mel Brooks to be particularly funny   My father showed me The Producers when I was about 13 and, because he found the movie hilarious, I obediently thought it was pretty funny.  (I later saw The Producers in a revival on Broadway and found the whole thing noisy and a bit tedious).  Most of Brooks' movies (for instance, Blazing Saddles) are sophomoric and outrageous rather than funny.  Comedy is very much a matter of personal taste and I acknowledge that my views on this point are idiosyncratic and, quite probably, wrongheaded. But I've never been able to warm to Brooks' form of comedy -- the exception, I think, is Young Frankenstein which manages to be funny as well beautifully made and stirring after the manner of the old Universal  horror movies of the thirties.  

High Anxiety (1977) is a Hitchcock parody film, incorporating elements of The Birds, Psycho, and Vertigo in the pastiche.  Brooks uses his repertoire stable of actors:  Harvey Korman, Cloris Leachman, and Madelaine Kahn.  He plays the hero himself in the film, a psychiatrist with a fear of heights (similar to the Jimmy Stewart character, Scotty in Vertigo).  The plot involves a murderous nurse (played by Leachman) who dominates an expensive insane asylum.  Hitchcock's movies are ultra-elegant, sophisticated, and sexually perverse.  His camerawork is stylized and extremely expressive:  Hitchcock favors exaggerated point-of-view scenes (a gun rotating in a first-person suicide scene, a shot through a glass of milk being consume by character); he also favors high, analytical angles, shots aimed straight down on the set and characters, and elaborate dollying and tracking effects -- Brooks doesn't have the budget or skill to imitate most of these effects and he, certainly, is unable to capture the swooning, dream-like sexuality that pervades Hitchcock's best movies.  (If you want to see Hitchcock parodied to perfection look at Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill or the first half of Body Double.)  Brooks' films (with the exception of Young Frankenstein) are tawdry, intentionally cheap-looking, and slovenly -- the humor resides in the ethnic comedy and the outrageous performances by the actors.  Although Brooks imitates some of Hitchcock's signature effects, he doesn't get them right and the film's direct parodies fall flat.  Brooks' sort of humor is physically embodied by Cloris Leachman who plays Nurse Diesel in the picture -- she wears a nurse's outfit and had her breasts rigged-out in a pyramidal upthrust brassiere that looks like the bra sported by Madonna during her one of her concert tours.  Leachman has a moustache, grey face, and speaks in a foreboding, portentous tone.  The make-up and costume are so over-the-top that she seems wholly monstrous. There's a scene in which she tortures Harvey Korman dressed in leather Nazi-style dominatrix gear in which Leachman is so hideous and menacing that the scene can't really be played for laughs.  She spanks Korman and, a few shots later, when he meets with Asylum's director, played by Brooks, we see him seating himself very gingerly on his bruised bottom.  The shrill Madelaine Kahn playing a JAP (Jewish-American Princess) appears as Brooks' love-interest -- she's fairly amusing but the part is underwritten.  The best and worst things in the movie feature Mel Brooks.  At a piano bar, he suddenly begins to croon a cleverly written song called "High Anxiety" -- he seems to be parodying Frank Sinatra and the sequence (similar to the "man about town" song and dance in Young Frankenstein) is very funny.  On the other hand, an extended scene involving vulgar New York Jews bickering at an airport might be funny to Jewish audiences; but I didn't think all the kvetching in this scene was funny at all.  High Anxiety also suffers from the absence of Gene Wilder.  The role of an old Jewish psychiatrist seems  obviously written for Wilder and the actor intone his lines echoing the comedian's distinctive delivery.  

There's a scene that embodies, I think, High Anxiety's  failings.  This is a showy sequence modeled on the famous stabbing scene in which Janet Leigh is butchered  while taking a shower.  Brooks cuts and assembles the scene in a montage that essentially duplicates the sequence in Psycho.  The murder scene in the original film begins with one of the strangest shots in cinema -- the camera is pointed right up at a shower-head that sprays water in perfect jets down onto the camera.  And, yet, the camera doesn't get wet.  So where is the camera located?  This riddle which is experienced subliminally by the viewers creates a dream-like ambiance to the violent murder -- the killing takes place in some strange space that is radically unlike actual space.  Brooks also points the camera up at the shower head or spigot.  But the water bursting out of the spigot pours onto the camera and drenches the lens.  This simple change alters the entire experience of the sequence, making the whole gory thing seem vastly different  from  Hitchcock's vision.