Mel Brooks’s High Anxiety (1977) earns a solid four stars in my ledger, one short of perfection only because even the finest soufflé tends to deflate a hair after forty-plus years. Still, the film remains a master class in affectionate lampoonery: a valentine scrawled in disappearing ink, equal parts schtick and scholarship, aimed directly at Alfred Hitchcock’s cool, terrified heart.
The project’s origin story reads like a Hollywood séance. Brooks, riding the commercial thermals of Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, wanted to tackle a “proper” genre spoof without the Wild West giddiness or slapstick Transylvanian lightning. Enter the Master of Suspense himself. Hitchcock entertained Brooks’s pitch, offered technical pointers, and even nit-picked the shower-curtain ring count (ten rings in Psycho, not Brooks’s thirteen, leave it to Hitch to know his bathware). Budget constraints scuttled some delicious gag ideas, picture the killer chasing Dr. Thorndyke onto a boat that promptly docks. Still, the core conceit survived: take a psychiatrist with vertigo, plug him into a murder plot, and watch the neuroses fly like pigeons at Fort Point.
Behind the camera, Brooks demonstrated uncharacteristic discipline. He screened Spellbound, Vertigo, Psycho, and The Birds frame by frame with cinematographer Paul Lohmann, dissecting Hitchcock’s elliptical cuts and chiaroscuro lighting so he could rebuild them as punchlines. Shooting at Mount St. Mary’s for the ominous institute and the just-opened Hyatt Regency San Francisco for the atrium set pieces gave the parody real architectural heft, less “cheap gag,” more “luxury satire suite with cliff-side view.”
Casting decisions bordered on inspired nepotism, and thank goodness for it. Madeline Kahn’s Victoria Brisbane matches Brooks beat for beat, brandishing her trademark half-airy, half-exasperated line readings. Cloris Leachman’s Nurse Diesel—part sadist, part sad décor critic—might secretly run the ward’s purchasing office. Harvey Korman slithers through corridors as Dr. Montague, all condescension and collar starch. Gene Wilder was the first-string Thorndyke, but scheduling conflicts punted him; Brooks stepped in and discovered, lo and behold, he could headline his own movie. His rubber-band facial expressions and Sinatra-by-way-of-Catskills crooning give the film an ego that never balloons enough to pop.
Production anecdotes deserve their own DSM-V entry. Brooks hired The Birds’ original bird wrangler, then reported on The Tonight Show that half the avian “droppings” falling on his head were genuine—method pigeons, evidently. Barry Levinson’s bellhop channels the Psycho music sting with nothing more than lung power and rolled newspaper, demonstrating that low-tech can still shred nerves (and inkscape bathroom tiles).
Critics responded with polite applause, laced with a hint of finger-wagging. Roger Ebert admired the enterprise but noted that spoofing something already laced with Hitchcockian humor courts redundancy. Pauline Kael muttered that imitation is the sincerest form of—well, imitation. Yet audiences laughed, the box office rang up a healthy $31 million, and Hitchcock sealed his blessing with six magnums of Château Haut-Brion and the single-word benediction “Splendid.” Decades later, the film’s jokes about psychoanalytic jargon—“penis envy” recast as “pee-pee envy”—still manage to puncture earnest academic balloons without entirely letting the helium out of Hitchcock’s aura.
In hindsight, High Anxiety stands as Brooks’s last unqualified genre bullseye before the law of diminishing returns nipped at his heels. It is scholarly without pedantry, silly without sloppiness, and affectionate without fawning. If you can tolerate one more bird-related gastrointestinal gag and a few Freudian double-entendres that date like avocado kitchen tiles, you’ll find a comedy that balances reverence with irreverence better than Thorndyke balances atop that San Juan Bautista bell tower. Vertigo never felt so jaunty.
⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4/5 Stars)
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