Blazing Saddles

1974

Mel Brooks aims his broadest satire at the Western itself. When a crooked state official needs the town of Rock Ridge cleared out for a railroad right of way, he appoints a Black sheriff, Bart (Cleavon Little), expecting the townspeople to revolt and abandon the town. Bart instead teams up with Jim, a washed up gunslinger known as the Waco Kid (Gene Wilder), and turns the scheme back on the men who cooked it up. Harvey Korman plays the scheming attorney general Hedley Lamarr, Slim Pickens his thick headed henchman, and Madeline Kahn earned an Academy Award nomination as saloon singer Lili Von Shtupp. Brooks himself turns up as the dim governor, and the film breaks its own fourth wall long before that was a common gag.