TSPDT

Key Production Country: USA
Key Genres: Comedy, Parody/Spoof, Absurd Comedy, Slapstick, Farce, Odd Couple Film
Key Collaborators: John Morris (Composer), John C. Howard (Editor), Madeline Kahn (Leading Character Actress), Dom DeLuise (Leading Character Actor), Gene Wilder (Leading Actor), Michael Hertzberg (Producer), Harvey Korman (Leading Character Actor), Cloris Leachman (Leading Character Actress), Ron Carey (Character Actor), Liam Dunn (Character Actor), Marty Feldman (Leading Actor), Rudy DeLuca (Screenwriter)

"The Producers was his debut as a director of feature films: his work is characterized by a zany style and the exploitation of extreme bad taste. Brooks has his own production company, BrooksFilms, which has been responsible for David Lynch's The Elephant Man (1980) and David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986)." - The Movie Book, 1999

"Content to make fun of anything and everything, Brooks' films run the gamut of witty, irreverent and vulgar. If there's a common trait to any of the man's films, it's his pure commitment to the laugh; Brooks will tear down the fabric of the worlds his films occupy for a single chuckle. The lack of rules are the rules. And it's that anarchic spirit that make his filmography so eminently watchable." - Cameron Denler (Collider, 2021)

"During the '70s, the only writer-directors working consistently in comedy were Mel Brooks (born Melvin Kaminsky) and Woody Allen. If, at that time, the former's films were more popular than Allen's, in retrospect that may prove how obvious were Brooks' methods and targets… Brooks' dependence on broad, blunt parody has become ever more predictable and infantile; his scope and achievement seem woefully limited." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)

"Brooks' place in the comedy pantheon was ultimately secured by a run of comedy films that he directed and co-wrote between 1968 and 1995 that have gone on to influence another generation or two of comedy directors. Oddly, for all the adulation he's received for his best-known films—The Producers (1968), Blazing Saddles (1974), Young Frankenstein (1974), High Anxiety (1977), History of the World: Part 1 (1981), Spaceballs (1987), Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995)—Brooks is most commonly referred to as a comedian, a "funnyman," a writer/producer, and even a "filmmaker." However, one rarely hears the simple phrase "director Mel Brooks." Suffice to say, these films didn't direct themselves." - Robert Weide (Directors Guild of America, 2012),

"In the 1970s, he found his forte as an irrepressible purveyor of freewheeling movie pastiches blending affection and vulgarity." - Chambers Film Factfinder, 2006

"In one astonishing calendar year - 1974 - Mel Brooks opened with the groundbreaking Blazing Saddles and finished it out with the enduring and beloved Young Frankenstein. Back then, if you were a movie-addicted 14-year-old boy, you dutifully stood in line with your pals, hoping the box office lady was looking the other way (Saddles was R-rated, rare indeed for a comedy) while you eagerly anticipated a chaotic comic cavalcade that gleefully served up racial satire, inappropriate sexual situations, naughty language (sometimes in Yiddish) and, of course, indelibly, bowls full of incendiary beans. To be a Mel Brooks fan at the height of his powers (from the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s) was to embrace anarchy at its most artful and to thumb your nose at all the so-called “standards” of your parents’ generation." - Laurence Maslon (The Washington Post, 2021)

"In the features he has directed Brooks has scored by turning the techniques of genre movies upside down… His work is in bad taste, irreverent and funny, and highly knowledgeable about the characteristics of the movies he satirizes." - The Illustrated Who's Who of the Cinema, 1983