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As Vanishing Point drew to a close the first thought that struck me is that this movie is Easy Rider with a car. The story of an ex-cop/pro-driver who for no reason is in process of a car delivery and decides to piss off the law and run the police all over the desert, uniting the outcasts of society on his way – it’s counter-culture a few years post it’s death, a death that was shown in Easy Rider.

The character that makes the whole movie work is Super Soul. He’s a DJ out at a desert radio station, and he becomes the unofficial narrator of the piece. He discovers Kowalski’s flight from the police via an illegal scanner and begins to broadcast Kowalski’s progress to all his listeners. Super Soul turns Kowalski into the last heroic soul there is, escaping the law, searching for the last vestiges of freedom in the west and gets the remaining dregs of counter-culture, hidden throughout the desert on Kowalski’s side.

If you’re looking for a deep plot, layers of metaphor and a full-fledged character arch Vanishing Point is probably not the film for you. Easy Rider does a lot more of that than this film. However, Vanishing Point does have its place among films from that influential decade of the 1970’s. This is one of the first macho car films. This is a loving whisper to the faded adventure of the golden west.

What Vanishing Point did for me more than anything is make me want a Dodge Challenger. This car is put through hell and back in Vanishing Point and I swear, by the end of the film the car achieves sex symbol status. Anything that can take a beating like that and keep on ticking is worth driving.

Director: Richard C. Sarafian
Writer: Guillermo Cabrea Infante
Kowalski: Barry Newman
Super Soul: Cleavon Little

Super Soul: And there goes the Challenger, being chased by the blue, blue meanies on wheels. The vicious traffic squad cars are after our lone driver, the last American hero, the electric centaur, the, the demi-god, the super driver of the golden west! Two nasty Nazi cars are close behind the beautiful lone driver. The police numbers are gettin' closer, closer, closer to our soul hero, in his soul mobile, yeah baby! They about to strike. They gonna get him. Smash him. Rape... the last beautiful free soul on this planet.

There are two rules in my world that apply to comedies: 1 – there are very few genuinely good comedies & 2 – no one does comedy like Mel Brooks. I think Blazing Saddles is a perfect comedy, one of Mel Brooks best. By any other filmmaker this film would be an insanely racist film, yet because Brooks doesn’t make fun of one race, he makes fun of everyone – Jew, African, Chinese, Irish, American – Brooks doesn’t care.

Blazing Saddles is one of the only movies I can recite almost word for word; when I watch the film it is practically a sing-along. The entire concept of the film is funny to me; the pioneer town of Rock Ridge gets the first black sheriff because the lt. governor wants to piss off the residents and drive them out so the rail road can go through the town, this sparks madness in all the best comic forms.

My favorite character in Blazing Saddles has always been The Waco Kid (aka Jim) played by Gene Wilder. Wilder starred in several of Mel Brooks films and his style of comedy perfectly blends with Books; Wilder has a sense of understated exaggeration in Blazing Saddles that makes him the perfect partner for Cleavon Little’s Sheriff Bart.

I challenge anyone to watch Blazing Saddles and not laugh hysterically at the end of the film. Brooks somehow manages to make breaking the fourth wall logical to his world, carry on the comedy in a way you didn’t expect and then push you back into the original film world without skipping a beat. It all works because of how much Brooks commits to it; it’s perfectly summe dup by Slim Pickens when his character tells another actor “Screw you, I work for Mel Brooks!”

Director: Mel Brooks
Writers: Mel Brooks, Norman Steinberg, Andrew Bergman, Richard Pryor & Alan Uger
Bart: Cleavon Little
Jim: Gene Wiler
Taggart: Slim Pickens
Hedley Lamarr: Harvey Korman
Lili Von Shtupp: Madeline Kahn
Gov. Lepetomane: Mel Brooks
Mongo: Alex Karras

Bart: Are we awake?
Jim: We're not sure. Are we... black?
Bart: Yes, we are.
Jim: Then we're awake... but we're very puzzled.