Mel Brooks Boxset Collection

Release Date: 2006-04-04, Rating NR (Not Rated),

Release Date: 2006-04-04, Rating NR (Not Rated),

This deluxe set compiles eight comedies directed -- and in most cases written or co-written -- by funnyman Mel Brooks, whose apprenticeship included stints with Your Show of Shows in the 1950s and a performing partnership with Carl Reiner. The collection is a mixed bag, composed more or less equally of classics, solid entertainments, and disappointing mediocrities. Mels second directorial effort, The Twelve Chairs (1970), was deemed a disappointment by many, although it enjoys a better reputation today. His two 1974 films, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, are widely considered to be his best, and in truth they hold up better than many of the others in this box. Silent Movie (1976), a fascinating but flawed attempt to replicate the slapstick comedy of yore, was Mels first as leading man as well as writer-director. He also took the starring role in High Anxiety (1977), an intermittently hilarious parody of Hitchcockian thrillers, then took a hiatus of several years before returning as part of an ensemble

Box Set Contains Following: "Blazing Saddles" - The railroad's got to run through the town of Rock Ridge. How do you drive out the townfolk in order to steal their land? Send in the toughest gang you've got... and name a new sheriff who'll last about 24 hours. But that's not really the plot of "Blazing Saddles," just the pretext. Once Mel Brooks' lunatic film - many call it his best - gets started, logic is lost in a blizzard of gags, jokes, quips, puns, howlers, growlers and outrageous assaults upon good taste or any taste at all. Cleavon Little as the new lawman, Gene Wilder as the wacko Waco Kid, Brooks himself as a dim-witted politico and Madeline Kahn in her Marlene Dietrich send-up that earned an Academy Award nomination all give this sagebrush saga their lunatic best. And when "Blazing Saddles" can't contain itself at the finale, it just proves the Old West will never be the same! "High Anxiety" - Mel Brooks' renowned spoof of the most famous Hitchcockian classics - "Vertigo," "The Birds," ...

DVDs. Mel Brooks Boxset Collection