The Cinematheque

New Restoration

“On a technical level, the film is clearly Mel Brooks’s best … Seeing Young Frankenstein in a theatre remains one of my earliest moviegoing memories … I couldn’t have been more than five or six—and surely could not understand much of the adult humour—but I remember loving it.”

Brian Scott Mednick, Library of Congress

The legendary sketch comic and parodist Mel Brooks is now 100 years old. At the age of eight he decided to make his friends laugh by imitating Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster—only instead of learning the tragedy of existence, he had the monster perform ​“Puttin’ on the Ritz,” a song popularized by Fred Astaire. About forty years later, he used the idea in Young Frankenstein, a gothic comedy about fate, destiny, and reflexive impulses. This send-up of genres—a lurching march of elegant absurdity and manic sophistication—is Brooks’s specialty. Gene Wilder plays Frederick Frankenstein, a scientist who’d rather not be associated with his grandfather, the original Dr. Frankenstein. But it happens anyway. Brooks called it ​“a delicate and private film,” perhaps because it is about the mysteries of paternity—Brooks’s father died when he was two. It’s also a wildly stylized comedy of childlike buffoonery, fake Germanic accents, and extremely loud innuendo.

“There hasn’t been this kind of craziness on the screen in years … It could seem like kids’ stuff—which of course it is, but it’s very funny kids’ stuff … The style of the picture is controlled excess, and the whole thing is remarkably consistent in tone, considering that it ranges from unfunny hamming to a masterly bit contributed by Gene Hackman.”

Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

“Peter Boyle’s monster is based lovingly not only on Karloff’s incarnation in the James Whale classic, but even slightly on the beauty-and-the-beast poignancy of King Kong … When Wilder and Boyle go into their version of ​‘Puttin’ on the Ritz,’ all of Brooks’s smouldering affection for showbiz performers seems to burst into flame.”

Andrew Sarris, Village Voice