Silent Movie (1976) - film review

Mel Funn was once a great filmmaker, before changing audience tastes and galloping alcoholism took their toll.  Determined to make a big comeback in the 1970s, Funn persuades the chief of Big Picture Studios to allow him to make a silent film.  To ensure the film is a success, Funn and his loyal buddies, Dom Bell and Marty Eggs, set about rounding up A-listers to appear in the movie.  They begin by attacking Burt Reynolds in his shower and then try their luck with James Caan, Liza Minnelli and Paul Newman.  Just when Funn feels he is on to a winner, he falls foul of a fiendish plot concocted by the evil conglomerate Engulf & Devour, which intends to buy Big Picture Studios in its relentless pursuit of big bucks...

Who would be mad enough to make a silent movie, almost half a century after the perfection of synchronised sound had put paid to the art of silent cinema?  Mel Brooks, who else!?   Having delivered the definitive spoofs of the western and horror genres - Blazing Saddles (1974) and Young Frankenstein (1974) - Brooks turned his talent for merciless mimicry to resurrecting an art form that was too hastily buried and proves, if proof be needed, that there’s no joke like an old joke.  Silent Movie is a spirited, tirelessly entertaining homage to the era of silent cinema, drawing its inspiration mainly from the comedic endeavours of Buster Keaton and Mack Sennett, but it also serves as a timely satire on modern corporate practice (seen through the dogged determination of one dollar-worshipping company to swallow up another).  If you thought silent cinema had its day in the late 1920s, think again.

For what is clearly Brooks’s most personal film (evidenced by the This is a true story caption), it is fitting that the director should cast himself in the lead role, more than ably supported by his sidesplitting sidekicks Dom DeLuise and Marty Feldman.  (With his facial contortions and gymnastic agility, Feldman is a natural for the silent comedy genre and is the best thing about this film.)  How Brooks was ever able to convince his backers to lend him the wherewithal to make a silent film in 1976 is one of the great unsolved mysteries of Hollywood, but the fact that he gained the anything-goes services of such mega-stars as Burt Reynolds, Paul Newman and Liza Minnelli (all utterly hilarious in their madcap cameo appearances) suggests that quite a few others shared Brooks’s confidence in the success of the venture.  Brooks even managed to persuade the legendary mime artist Marcel Marceau to appear in the film and break his professional vow of silence by delivering the film’s one spoken line: "Non!"  It is hard to know which to admire more - Brooks’s audacity or his penchant for comedy.

Although Silent Movie did not achieve anything like the box office return of Brooks’ previous comedy offerings, it was a notable critical success and is considered by some to be his best film.  Lacking Brooks’s trademark bawdy humour, the film certainly has wider appeal and can be enjoyed by audiences of all ages.  Brooks’s unfortunate tendency to linger on weak gags, to drag out comic situations to the n-th degree, long after the humour has evaporated, is far less evident in this film, and in fact it is a challenge to keep up with the boisterous stream of sight gags that race across the screen at a hyperactive hare’s pace.  Things get a little silly as the plot runs out of steam towards the end, but Brooks launches enough comedy missiles to keep the laughs coming. 

The comic highlight has to be the insane but brilliant sequence in which Mel and his hapless sidekicks go chasing after Paul Newman in electric wheelchairs, defying logic and most of the laws of physics in what is probably the funniest thing ever committed to celluloid, although the gangster-themed showdown with the exploding Coca-Cola cans comes a close second.  Silent Movie is Mel Brooks at his most inspired, a non-stop marathon of belt-busting gags that both celebrates the cinema of the past and laments the moviemaking trends of the present.  Relentlessly (and tastefully) funny, this is a comedy classic which now manages to outshine virtually every other American comedy of the 1970s - and it is as powerful an incentive to revisit the work of the great comedians of the silent era as you could hope for.  They say that silence is golden - well, here’s a film which proves just that, with interest.

© Steve Chandler 2011

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