Young Frankenstein

Take Gene Wilder's wild-haired hysteria, Cloris Leachman's pasty-faced teutonics, Madeline Kahn's pinched-mouth operatics, Marty Feldman's eye-popping ecstasy, Peter Boyle's hulking histrionics, stitch them together, and you get a mind-boggling monstrosity, complete with whinnying horses, a dance number set to “Puttin' on the Ritz,” a “Schwanstuker” the size of Delaware, and a mad scientist, pronounced “Fronk-en-steen,” who rejects his family's legacy. Mel Brooks was never zanier as he does Transylvania with a twist, aided by coscribbler Wilder. A lot of the jokery hits below the borscht belt-Igor's nomadic hump and Frau Blücher's Germanically slung “Ovaltine”-but it certainly put new life into Mary Shelley's creature feature.

This page may by only partially complete. For additional information about this film, view the original entry on our archived site.