CATCH A CLASSIC

Mel Brooks Triple Feature

TCM, Beginning at 7 p.m.

Three of the high points of Mel Brooks’ filmmaking career — and three of the funniest comedies in Hollywood history — are on display with tonight’s hilarious triple feature on Turner Classic Movies. First up is 1974’s Young Frankenstein (pictured), directed by Brooks from an Oscar-nominated screenplay by Brooks and star Gene Wilder that is a pitch-perfect send-up of 1930s horror classics, particularly Universal’s various Frankenstein adaptations. Peter Boyle, Marty Feldman, Cloris Leachman, Teri Garr, Kenneth Mars and Madeline Kahn round out the exceptional ensemble cast. Leachman and Kahn are back in tonight’s next film, High Anxiety (1977), which marked Brooks’ first lead speaking role. Not quite as successful a parody as Young Frankenstein, it still manages to take sharp and uproarious aim at its subject: the characters, tropes and techniques of Hollywood suspense thrillers, particularly the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Harvey Korman also costars. Tonight’s final Brooks classic is another one released in 1974, and one often regarded as his most brilliantly funny work ever: Blazing Saddles. Directed by Brooks, who cowrote the screenplay with, among others, comedian Richard Pryor, Blazing Saddles is led by Cleavon Little as a Black man who shocks a frontier town when he is appointed the new sheriff. The film holds nothing back as TWENTIETH CENTURY-FOX FILM CORPORATION it skewers the conventions of old-time Hollywood Westerns, particularly their racist elements. Wilder, Korman and Kahn are also among the ensemble cast, with Kahn nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar.