**/**** Image B Sound B
starring Mel Brooks, Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, Harvey Korman
screenplay by Mel Brooks, Ron Clark, Rudy DeLuca, Barry Levinson
directed by Mel Brooks
by Bill Chambers There are three clever sight gags in Mel Brooks's disingenuous love letter to Alfred Hitchcock High Anxiety, all of which poke fun at Hitchcock's invasive camera. As far as I can tell, the remaining laughs have no real precedent in the Master's work, while riffs on signature moments from Vertigo, Psycho, and The Birds elicit nary a titter. (It doesn't help that filmmakers straight-faced and tongue-in-cheek alike had plundered those pictures long before Brooks came along; the movie was destined to be impotent in a Brian DePalma world.) Choosing the misbegotten Spellbound, oddly, as its jumping-off point, High Anxiety stars Brooks as acrophobic Dr. Richard H. Thorndyke, the new Chief of Staff at "The Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous." After stumbling upon some corrupt bookkeeping, Thorndyke is hustled off to a psychiatric convention by the scheming Nurse Diesel (Cloris Leachman, perhaps doing Rebecca's Mrs. Danvers) and her S&M-craving toady Dr. Charles Montague (Harvey Korman), where he meets the requisite blonde bombshell (Madeline Kahn) and becomes a murder suspect.
High Anxiety isn't as successful as Brooks's western and Universal horror spoofs Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, respectively, because it operates on two decidedly flawed premises: 1) that Hitchcock was a genre unto himself; and 2) that putty-faced Brooks is a suitable surrogate for Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant or even Spellbound's Gregory Peck. It's difficult to satirize an artist–at least in the revue fashion of Mel Brooks–because you're relying on motifs and iconography instead of clichés and conventions. And it's difficult to satirize Hitchcock in particular because he did it himself with North by Northwest, a post-modern send-off for his most formulaic tendencies. Kahn makes for a surprisingly sexy femme fatale, but in a nod to currency that ironically dates the movie more than referencing an older picture would have, her look is patterned on that of Karen Black in Hitchcock's then-recent Family Plot. Of course, the preponderance of brown already traps the movie in 1977, finally making High Anxiety the cinematic equivalent of an Elvis impersonator.
Fox debuts High Anxiety on DVD as part of The Mel Brooks Collection. The 1.88:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer is probably optimal: Given the sparkling clarity of the opening titles, it would appear that the overall softness of the image is endemic to the cinematography. Optical shots are predictably speckled with dirt and grain. No complaints about the Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo remix, except to say it's too bad it wasn't mastered at a louder volume, as it doesn't respond terribly well to amplification. Left-right separation is minimal outside of John Morris's score. (Morris, for what it's worth, imitates Franz Waxman better than he does Bernard Herrmann, if indeed that's what he's doing here.) Trailers for High Anxiety, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, Silent Movie, To Be Or Not to Be, and Young Frankenstein round out the platter.
94 minutes; PG; 1.88:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 2.0 (Stereo), French DD 2.0 (Mono), Spanish DD 2.0 (Mono); English, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Fox
