1975 he wrote, directed and starred in a little movie called "The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter brother", which I remember with fondness and for which I have been searching for a couple of years. I finally found a DVD of the movie a few weeks ago, ordered it and saved it unopened until both SWMBO and I were sufficiently recovered from our various malaise until we could watch it together. I admit, I was a bit disappointed. It doesn't seem as fresh and spontaneous as it did in 1975, but that may have been because Wilder (Jerome Silberman) really needed the genius of Mel Brooks to teach him what comedy was all about.
Ignoring his 1963 Broadway rendition of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest with Kirk Douglas", Wilder had a small but impressive movie part in "Bonnie and Clyde" in 1967 as " ... as a frightened young undertaker abducted by the duo".
But in his appearance as "Leo Bloom" in Brooks' "The Producers", opposite the brilliant but zany Zero Mostel, Wilder proved himself capable of making the most sublime characterization seem almost reasonable. (Note: now that Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick on Broadway have taken over the roles of Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder as "The Producers", you can't find images of the original movie on the Internet!)
As the man who finds himself drawn into impossibly bizarre situations, most often through no fault of his own, the frizzy-haired, inadvertently felon Wilder lent credence to the most improbable plot twists.
Watching Wilder was usually much like watching a Donald Duck cartoon; when the Duck played a baseball pitcher and his wind-up was so vigorous that his pitching arm turned into an airplane propeller, causing him to rise up off the ground ... Wilder movies also called upon the viewer to 'suspend disbelief' in order to appreciate the situation.
Brooks brought Wilder through some of the zaniest social situations imaginable. And every picture he ever made was, to some extent, a 'con job'.
In The Producers, the con was to produce a play which was so outrageous that nobody would attend it past the first night. Then Mostel, who with his extreme comb-over would somehow romance elderly widows to invest in the play (until it was 1000% oversubscribed). Finally, when the show bombed, the huckster Mostel and the milquetoast accountant Wilder would abscond with the investments ... which had of course been used up by the newly found wild lifestyle. Of course, because of the unpredictably fickle Broadway audience, the most outrageous script, most disgusting musical lyrics of "Springtime for Hitler and Everyone" was judged to be "Camp" (shades of Televisions "Batman) and the dynamic duo of Mostel and Wilder were required to distribute profits instead of wiping the slate clean in the planned El Bombo.
Sure, it was both silly and stupid, but the combined brilliance of Brooks and Mostel (as well as the small but significant contribution of the vaguely effeminate Wilder) it seemed almost ... reasonable.
After Wilder's semi-failed attempt at independence with "Sherlock Holmes .." ("Sheer Luck!"), Wilder dallied in "Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory", and later went back to Brooks. In an improbable teaming with Cleavon Little (later to star in a short-lived but hilarious hospital-based comedy named "Temperature's Rising") found his forte' in 1974's "Blazing Saddles", a cowboy movie where he played the improbable gunslinger "The Waco Kid". ("Wanna see my fast draw? Wanna see it again?")
"Blazing Saddles" somehow managed to combine Wilder, Little, Brooks, Alex Karras, Slim Pickens, Harvey Korman and Madeline Kahn (remember these names, you'll see many of them again) in a movie which featured the famous line (with Little holding a pistol to his own head) declaiming: "Nobody Moves, or the nigger gets it!".
To everyone's surprise, this was among the most memorable ... and most laughable ... lines in the movie. One of the cast found it extremely difficult to deliver lines including "the 'N-word", but was convinced by, of all persons Mel Brooks. Cleavon Little reportedly laughed through the making of the movie because of the discomfort of "the white boys". Everybody laughed through the "Bean Fart Scene" which was bowlderized in the television version ... the sound track was 'suppressed' ane parts of other scenes were completely deleted in both the television and the first-run movie. You have to buy/rent the DVD to see the movie as it was originally intended.
Later in 1974 (they were on a roll), Brooks and Wilder combined with Kahn to create"Young Frankenstein", featuring Peter Boyle as "The Monster". Marty Feldman, Wilder's alter ego in "Sherlock Holmes" and Cloris Leachman as "Frau Blucher" and Terri Garr as "Inga" all contributed some of the most memorable 'straight lines' in comedic movie history. It may be that Wilder's frizzy hair made him a 'natural choice' to play Frankenstein's grandson ("That's Frahnensteen!), but Wilder managed to hold his own among the most notorious scene-stealers since Harvey Korman and Dom DeLuis (and Brooks himself) in "Blazing Saddles".
The next year, Wilder co-starred with Richard Pryor in the improbable "Silver Streak", with Jill Clayburgh, Ned Beatty and Patrick McGoohan (Secret Agent Man) 'as Deveraux'. This was a patent contest between Pryor and Wilder to steal scenes; the score is tied, as it was in 1989's "See No Evil, Hear No Evil" (Wilder was blind, Pryor was deaf: or was it the other way around? Event they sometimes seemed to lose track but it didn't matter) and the earlier 1980 "Stir Crazy".
Somewhere in the middle of all that, Wilder marries Gilda Radner and, after she contracts Cancer, they star together in a comedically poignant (if that's possible) "Haunted Honeymoon".
Someday, someone will write the life story of Gene Wilder and it will prominently include the love story between Wilder and Radner. It won't be Carol Lombard and Cary Grant; it won't be Bogart and Becall; it won't be Tracy and Hepburn. But it will be no less important to the people who were involved, and The One Who Was Left Behind.
Why was this written?
Because if you haven't watched Wilder with some appreciation for his life's work, you've missed something that isn't important to anyone but you.
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