One of the great canards of the culture wars is that you couldn’t make Blazing Saddles today. It’s a half-truth that disguises a bigger lie. There are a thousand and one reasons why it would be hard—though, as Django Unchained proved, not impossible—to get a movie like Blazing Saddles made in contemporary Hollywood, from the declining public knowledge of the Western genre conventions it parodies to the general demise of big, mainstream comedy movies from the major studios. But the idea that you couldn’t make Blazing Saddles today is not about any of that. It is, more than anything, about the prodigious number of N-words the film jams into 93 minutes. “You couldn’t make Blazing Saddles today” is the rallying cry of people who think politically correct cancel culture is a major force in American society even as the U.S. slides deeper and deeper into Christian-nationalist fascism. The irony, of course, is that were Blazing Saddles to be erased from memory Yesterday-style and then unleashed on the world afresh tomorrow, Elon Musk would spend more time crying about it on X The Everything App than he has about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey having Black people in it.

There are many features that set Mel Brooks’s films apart from other parodic and gleefully transgressive joke-a-minute comedies. Amongst the zaniness, there is a literariness that makes him more than a gag writer; there is a deep cinephilia that makes his genre parodies rich in detail so lacking from Scary Movie et al. (Young Frankenstein captures the look, sound and feel of 1931’s Frankenstein to freakish precision. Ditto High Anxiety for Hitchcock and Silent Movie for the silent era.) There is his emphasis on Jewish identity, both his own and his characters’, which he has always cited as key in the development of his comedy. Born in a Brooklyn tenement a century ago, his father died of tuberculosis when he was just two years old, and as he grew into a small, sickly boy, he used humor as a defense against his bullies. When he served in the Army during World War II—as a combat engineer, among other roles—he once heard Germans singing over the other side of the river, and responded by singing “Toot, Toot, Tootsie (Goo’ Bye!)” into a bullhorn.

Humor, for Brooks, has always been a kind of weapon. “The angrier he is, the funnier he is,” his improv partner and best pal Carl Reiner said. “He will say things you can’t believe, but you realize it’s the absolute truth.”

The original 1974 Gone in 60 Seconds is a gonzo car stunt showcase. Almost half the movie is a single car chase through six California cities, from Long Beach to Carson; during its filming, ninety-three cars were destroyed. Writer-director, producer and star HB Halicki was a stuntman with a dream, and he powered that dream to reality buying cars at a city auction for 200 bucks and convincing his friends and family to play roles on-screen. It’s an improbable success story that ended in tragedy, when he was killed by a falling telephone pole on the set of Gone in 60 Seconds 2 in 1989. 

I’m not going to talk about any of that. 

The first half of Gone in 60 Seconds, before it turns into an insane car chase, is what a curmudgeon might call “boring” and “badly made.” The car theft ring at the story’s center has a contract to steal forty-eight specific cars and deliver them to the docks by Friday, and a lot of screentime is spent on logistical meetings. Much of the dialogue in these scenes is dubbed over footage where you can’t see the actors’ mouths or even faces, shot without a script and cobbled together by editor Warner E. Leighton. They’re some of the best, most realistic scenes in film history.