Card Tricks

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD-PART I

Directed and Written by Mel Brooks

If history, as they say, is a pack of tricks the living play on the dead, then Mel Brooks, who should be good at this game, is playing with a very thin deck. In his recreation of four epochs (prehistory, the Roman Empire, the Spanish Inquisition and the French Revolution), he uses only two cards: cruelty and scatology. They are not aces. They are not even jokers.

It may be that Brooks requires something specific--like an old movie genre --on which to focus his talent. His attempt to make an extravagant musical number out of the Inquisition, a reprise of his famous Springtime for Hitler number in The Producers, is one of the worst calculated comic turns in movie history. We have no distance--not in our time--from the spectacle of people being subjected to pain for their beliefs.

Overwhelmed by his task, unable to find suitable employment for such worthy comedians as Madeline Kahn and Harvey Korman, he reverts to that childishness of poo-poo caca jokes. Bad taste has always been Brooks' strong suit, and one has honored him in the past for his astonishing assaults on gentility. This time, however, the result is a truly terrible movie. --By Richard Schickel

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