Monster Mash

By JAY COCKS

YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN

Directed by MEL BROOKS Screenplay by GENE WILDER and MEL BROOKS

Of course it's funny.

And of course it's grating, flatulent, desperate--all in the best and the worst manner of Mel Brooks. As comic and as film maker, Brooks wants to knock you cockeyed. For a laugh, he will do anything, try anything. He rains gags. After a Brooks bit, audiences can be exhausted; after a Brooks film, there is the lingering feeling of having been pummeled. Brooks is like a young, slightly skittish fighter whose energy compensates for lack of finesse. He hits out wildly, continuously, hoping that a few punches will land. Since comedy audiences usually have their guard down (they want to be entertained and they expect the pile-driving), Brooks generally succeeds. He keeps the pressure turned up high, and the laughs batter their way through. The attack is so relentless, it can leave the viewer bruised as well as amused.

Larkish Script. The bedrock of all Brooks films is frenzy; the nominal subject of Young Frankenstein--the skyhook for all the madness--is a satirical exhumation of Mary Shelley's classic. The Shelley story ought to have turned wormy by this time from virtually constant exposure. It is, however, still a powerful myth. One good measure of its resiliency is that even when Brooks is lampooning it, the story remains compelling, nearly inviolate. When Gene Wilder's Dr. Frankenstein tries to zap life into a grotesque, inanimate form, the movie goes serious despite itself. The myth is better, more involving than the jokes being made about it.

The larkish script concerns a descendant of Victor Frankenstein--a level and kindly sort who is forever being ridiculed for his forebear's madness. An edict in an old will summons young Frankenstein to middle Europe, and he travels to Transylvania by train. ("Pardon me, boy," he inquires, "is this the Transylvania Station?"). He is greeted by Igor (Marty Feldman), a hunchbacked servant with a movable hump and askew eyes, and conducted to mist-shrouded Castle Frankenstein. Soon he stumbles on Victor's secret experimental notes, bound in handsome leather and stamped HOW I DID IT. "What a fruitcake!" young Frankstein cries out in disbelief. He is quickly seduced, though, by the siren call of Victor's madness and is soon trying to reproduce the experiments. He is aided by a shapely but vacant assistant called Inga (Teri Garr) and by the stainless-steel housekeeper Frau Blucher, played by Cloris Leachman, who does a skillful and witty parody on the Judith Anderson role in Hitchcock's Rebecca.

Frankenstein's monster is Peter Boyle (Joe), an actor wonderfully deft at being clumsy. The movie galvanizes just about the time of his appearance. Boyle shows up in, and helps make work, the two sharpest scenes: an encounter with a blind hermit (Gene Hackman, doing a dexterous comic cameo), in which the monster is assaulted by the hermit's well-intentioned blundering; and a brief foray into show biz, in which Frankenstein and his creation put on a fractured vaudeville. Brooks is always at his best making fun of the delicious stupidities of popular entertainment (recall Springtime for Hitler in The Producers), and this scene, with scientist and subject in top hat and tails performing Puttin ' On the Ritz, is some sort of deranged high point in contemporary film comedy.

For moments like that, Brooks can be forgiven almost anything. He always furnishes plenty that needs forgiving, but his best scenes are madder, funnier, more inspired than anything being done in movies today, including the rather coddled comedy of Woody Allen. Brooks must also have got tired of people telling him what a maladroit technician he has been, and he has taken some pains to correct that failing here. Young Frankenstein is his best-crafted film so far. It contains uniformly excellent performances, among which Madeline Kahn's delicate but libidinous fiancee ranks high.

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