Overlooked Movie Marathon 2: Young Frankenstein (1974)

Everyone has a few movies that mean something to them.  Whether it be a movie that inspired you to do a certain thing, or a movie that you grew up loving, movies mean different things to everyone.  One movie that means more to me than many other movies is Robin Hood: Men in Tights.  I would never consider it a great movie and understand people who dislike the movie.  However, it has its own place in my heart.  I watched it the night that my grandfather died.  It comforted me in the time when I was an emotional wreck.  Mel Brooks made something that will always be meaningful to me, and something that I will always enjoy.

It is with that introduction that I come to the next film in the second annual Overlooked Movie Marathon.  There was a Mel Brooks movie that I had never watched the entirety of that I decided to include in the marathon.  It’s not the only Mel Brooks film I have yet to see, but it was near the top of the list of must see movies.  The movie is Young Frankenstein, a comedic take on the early Universal produced Frankenstein movies.  It starred Gene Wilder as the new Doctor Frankenstein, who has been brought back to his ancestral home by way of a will leaving the property to him.  As he tries to further the research of the Frankensteins before him, he is accompanied by Igor (Marty Feldman), Inga (Teri Garr), Frau Blucher (Cloris Leachman), and a newly resurrected monster (Peter Boyle).

I won’t bury the lead.  Young Frankenstein made me laugh a whole lot less than I expected to.  I was expecting a rolling on the floor, laughing out loud, gut busting comedy and I did not get it.  That did not matter, though.  What I got was a clever little spoof of classic horror flicks that, although not as funny as I anticipated, was quite an amusing little movie.  I was smiling almost the entire way through.  There’s an intelligence to older spoofs and parodies that seems to have fallen by the wayside in recent years.  Young Frankenstein represents the older style where the jokes that are being added to a film template are jokes which should have the ability to resonate throughout the years that follow.  As the years have gone by, the genre of spoof and parody have gone to make very time sensitive pop culture jokes that will not sit well with future generations.  Do children born in the last ten years understand “Wassup!?!?!?” jokes that were put in the parody flicks from a decade ago?  I don’t know.  Will they understand physical jokes involving darts missing the dart board?  They probably will.  There’s a difference between the comedic focus of parody movies in recent years and those of the past like Young Frankenstein.  I can respect and still chuckle at the jokes throughout Young Frankenstein.  It has a certain timelessness to it that makes it watchable for any generation of movie watchers.

What I am trying to say in that paragraph right above this is that although I may not have found Young Frankenstein as funny as I expected it to be, I still consider it a better movie than many others that have tried to do the same sort of thing.  The acting and the writing are top notch.  There’s not a performance that I find unworthy of being considered great.  Every performance further attains my respect for the movie.  Gene Wilder is obviously good.  When isn’t he?  Peter Boyle fills the role of the monster with both childish wonder and intimidation.  Feldman gives a performance as Igor that should have made him into a more recognizable name.  I’m going to stop there, if only because I don’t want to go through the entire cast saying that they were all great.  I should mention that the female cast of the movie was just as good as the male cast.  Leachman, Garr, and Madeline Kahn all fill their roles to a level that I don’t think anyone else could have.  The roles were perfectly cast and exceptionally played throughout the film.  There are no weak spots that I could see.  As for the writing, even though I may not have laughed throughout the movie, I would say that most of the jokes were successful.  Wilder and Brooks put together a loving send-up to the monster movies that they grew up on.  Perhaps that’s where the difference between parodies of then and now comes from.  Perhaps you need a certain adoration for the subject matter in order to make the parody work.  I’m getting away from myself though.  The writing is very strong throughout Young Frankenstein.  Not only is the movie humorous in its parodying, but it sticks to a story and follows through in its entirety.

Young Frankenstein is a good example of how to execute a comedy.  It knows exactly what it is doing, and it does it with a focused hand.  Mel Brooks had a classic film on his hands when he made this.  Many comedies are movies of their specific time.  They come out, get a lot of laughs in the moment, and fade away to be forgotten by future generations.  Young Frankenstein will survive this and be remembered years from when it was released, years from now, and years after the recent parodies are forgotten.  It is a timeless comedy that will be cherished long into the future.

Up next in the second annual Overlooked Movie Marathon is Taxi Driver.  That’s right.  I’ve never seen Taxi Driver before.  I’m going to fix that really soon, and then I’ll tell you some of my thoughts about it.  Look forward to that in the next few days.  See you soon.