I really like the hits and misses of Mel Brooks. He has brought joy to us all in many forms, from his comedy act to a series of fun movies. This one just didn't do it for me. I guess the concept was lacking any reason to exist. I can give it a six because of the characters' names, a lot of one liners, and a Brooksian bit of panache. It has an all-star cast with wonderful cameos, but it has little if any center to it. If we want to see silent films, we should watch Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd. But there are some rather nice moments and it comes across in a polished way. And, of course, there's the bit with Marcel Marceau. Not enough, however, to save the film.

In Hollywood, director Mel Funn (Mel Brooks) is a recovering alcoholic trying to make a comeback. Along with his friends Dom Bell (Dom DeLuise) and Marty Eggs (Marty Feldman), he's trying to pitch a silent movie to Big Picture Studios chief (Sid Caesar). Facing a hostel takeover, he approves the project as long as they get the biggest stars to commit to the film. They are able to sign Burt Reynolds, James Caan, Liza Minnelli, Anne Bancroft and Paul Newman. Marcel Marceau says no. Mel falls completely in love with Vilma Kaplan (Bernadette Peters) but she turns out to be a spy trying to stop the film. This drives Mel back to the bottle.God bless Mel Brooks. I love that he's trying something unusual. The problem is that it doesn't make it funny. The story is simply an excuse to have one gag after another while the stars make cameos. I want this to be gut busting hilarity. I can only say that I like the characters and everybody's effort. The best silent comedians for me are Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. Their comedies are much more physical and sometimes have great memorable stunts. I appreciate this attempt but not the result.

What I'm reviewing here is the last of the "Slapstickers" series of Movies on the Lawn at the Baton Rouge Gallery-a series of classic silent comedies presented at the last Saturday of each month with an accompaniment of a live contemporary band of which this particular movie I'm commenting on had the musical stylings of Caftan Green (I think that was the name of the group). Anyway, I had previously seen this on Cinemax with the original John Morris score so it was such a treat to watch this again with a brand new score with some familiar jazz numbers spread throughout. The gags thought by director/star Mel Brooks and others were quite funny especially when they involved getting Big Stars to do his movie of which one of them was his actual wife Anne Bancroft. And both Dom DeLuise and Marty Feldman as his associates also contributed their own funny turns. I'm sure some gags may be dated to anyone born after the year this film was actually made but most of them are still quite effective today like the board of Engulf and Devour's reaction to their first viewing of a picture of Bernadette Peters' sexy poster. Oh, and many of the mostly middle aged audience I saw this with reacted appreciatively, laughing as loud as I did during the whole thing. So on that note, I very highly recommend Silent Movie. P.S. Since the score was a live one on this viewing, someone behind the screen said "Non!" when Marcel Marceau said the only spoken part of this picture.

I suppose if anything epitomizes the style of Mel Brooks it is audacity, obscenity and a forthright quality that others seem either reluctant to use or often overplay with disastrous results. Brooks will do anything for a laugh. Anything. He is, for all intents and purposes, incapable of embarrassment. He's a rabble-rouser. His movies abide in a world in which everything is likely, especially the outrageous, and Silent Movie, where Brooks makes a bountiful aesthetic gamble and pulls it off, makes me laugh abundantly. On the Brooks calibration of amusement, I laughed not too radically more or less than at Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles or The Producers. It just doesn't have the subversive and ironic panache of those classic films.Brooks' fifth film as director, Silent Movie is streamlined fun. It's obvious in almost every shot that the filmmakers had a party making it. It's set in Hollywood, where Big Pictures Studio lurches on the brink of Chapter 11 and a merger with the mammoth Engulf and Devour syndicate, a daintily disguised reference to Gulf+Western's Paramount takeover. Enter Mel Funn (guess who), a has-been director whose career was stopped cold by drunkenness, who pledges to salvage the studio by persuading Hollywood's biggest stars to make a silent movie. This is a scenario that results in countless inside jokes, but the thing about Brooks's inside jokes is that their outsides are funny as well.The wild bunch of Mel, Dom DeLuise and Marty Feldman embark to charm the superstars, resulting in the shower of one, who counts his hands, confused, and discovers he has eight; and swooping another out of a nightclub audience. There are several "actual" stars in the movie, but the fun is in not knowing who's next. Everything transpires surrounded by a glossary of sight gags, classic and original. There are bits that don't work and durations of up to a minute, I guess, when we don't laugh, but a minute can feel pretty long. Perhaps it is Brooks' desire to control all that displaces an objective view of what will work.Nevertheless, in a movie overflowing with skillful Chaplin-, Keaton- and Laurel and Hardy-inspired set pieces, these parts are the chef d'oeuvre: Right before seeing the Studio Chief, Mel and his friends cross their fingers for good luck, and Mel can't uncross his. He shakes hands with the Chief, and the Chief's fingers are crossed rather than Mel's. The Chief then passes this crossed state to his secretary's fingers the same way. Another running gag is obvious discrepancy between the title cards and what the characters are really saying. The spoken lines are inaudible, as it is indeed a silent movie, but they can be clearly lipread. At one point Brooks asserts misgivings about DeLuise's idea of a silent movie by shouting "That's crazy!" as well as an agitated mouthful, but the screen says "Maybe you're right." In another scene, Marty hits on a nurse but gets slapped. When he gets back in the car, Mel obviously mouths a curse word, although the screen says "You bad boy!" And then there's the scene where Feldman and DeLuise haphazardly unplug and plug in his heart monitor various times, winding up changing the screen to a ping pong game and playing while the Chief flatlines and recovers over and over. Brooks stands outside the majority of Jewish comics and filmmakers in his lack of self-derision and in the success of his main characters, but still, humor is his own defense mechanism against the world, and he goes for broke.