TCM Files - Young Frankenstein

I love old movies. Luckily for me there is Turner Classic Movies (TCM), which shows a ton of these great films, so I generally record one a week and try to find time to watch it before the next week begins. This may become a semi-regular feature describing my thoughts on the previous week’s selection.

Week 1 – Young Frankenstein (1974)

This is a really odd choice to lead off with, since it’s not really a classic in the Casablanca or Citizen Kane sense. However, I have been regularly watching old movies for over a year, and just now started the corresponding blog entries. So this is what we ended up with – luck of the draw. Young Frankenstein made the list because it is ranked on the American Film Institute’s (AFI) lists of 100 comedies (#13) and songs (#89).

I’ll start by saying I’m not generally a fan of Mel Brooks movies. Everyone in my dorm seemed to think that Blazing Saddles was the funniest movie ever, so I laughed along but never really got into it. I tend to think Spaceballs is overrated, but it has been a while since I’ve seen it. And there are two movies of his that I started and opted not to finish: High Anxiety, which I just thought was a little blah, and the Producers, which is in the running for the worst movies I’ve seen (maybe it gets better later on, but I doubt it). On the flip side, I do like Gene Wilder, though that’s almost solely due to his playing Willy Wonka in the film of the same name. So I started the movie with rather low expectations overall.

And those expectations were almost entirely met. I didn’t find the movie awful, but at the same time I didn’t much like it. It followed the usual Brooks format – lots and lots of buildup for one sight gag or pun-ny quip. Those would generally make me chuckle, but there certainly weren’t any moments where I laughed aloud. I was expecting the “Walk this way” line (which is famously from this film) to be funny, and was disappointed. I thought the same gag was much better done in After the Thin Man, a film 38 years older than Young Frankenstein. Igor was funny at times, having some of the best lines, but there weren’t enough to really keep me interested. And the two most amusing lines of dialogue (“Eye-gor…” and “Werewolf…”) happened within the first half hour or so of the movie, after which things continued downhill.

Oh, and lastly, this movie made AFI’s list of best movie songs for the well-known “Puttin’ on the Ritz” scene. That scene pretty well captured my thoughts on the movie as a whole – the first time the punchline occurred, I chuckled a little to myself, but then it kept going on and I got bored with the whole thing. The plot moved fairly well, but you more or less know the storyline going in – you watch movies like this for the jokes, and those didn’t impress me. Overall, I didn’t hate this movie, but I certainly disliked more than I liked.

2 stars out of 5.