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"Our Forefathers" the wanking apes, plus ça change... Birth of art and its "inevitable afterbirth" the critic, cave paintings and the doofus who whizzes on them. "Stand-up philosopher" Mel Brooks across the epochs, including butter-fingered Moses and hapless Roman jester. "The only thing we don't have a god for is premature ejaculation... but I hear that's coming quickly." Dom DeLuise's Caesar out of Fellini Satyricon, The Scarlet Empress for Madeline Kahn's Nympho and her priapic inspection, a cameo by Oedipus Rex ("Hey motherfucker!"). A boffo number sums up the Inquisition, a Broadway dungeon where Torquemada scores a jackpot with rabbis tied to a giant slot-machine. "We've flattened their fingers / We've branded their buns / Nothing is working / Send in the nuns!" So it goes, lowbrow vaudeville on a lavish scale, eternal human cruelties in a scatological flow. (Laughter first emerges in the Stone Age as an audience watches a dinosaur munching on a fellow Neanderthal.) Civilization moves on, says Brooks, but the unclean animal remains. John Hurt's beaming Jesus points up the influence of Buñuel's The Milky Way, Leonardo on the Last Supper invokes Pasolini's The Decameron. Stentorian narration by Orson Welles adds a gloss of respectability perfectly crumbled by Gregory Hines with Mighty Joint in hand. Such poverty that a Maurice Chevalier accent must do in the place of a proper language, declares Madame DeFarge (Cloris Leachman), thus the French Revolution. Le Roi uses peons for target practice, cf. Russell's The Devils, Count de Monet (Harvey Korman) notices a pail-carrying doppelgänger: "Your Majesty, you look like the piss-boy." "And you look like a bucket of shit!" It doesn't so much end as just stop with the coming attractions, Jews in Space of course becomes Spaceballs. With Sid Caesar, Pamela Stephenson, Ron Carey, Shecky Greene, Mary-Margaret Humes, Sammy Shore, Spike Milligan, Andreas Voutsinas, Howard Morris, Henny Youngman, and Paul Mazursky.
--- Fernando F. Croce |