Directed by: Mel Brooks
Starring: Mel Brooks, Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, Harvey Korman, Barry Levinson, Rudy DeLuca, Ron Carey, Dick Van Patten, Howard Morris
The biggest laughs from High Anxiety come from its sheer goofiness and good cheer. It is surely a parody of Hitchcock films, including a plot which Hitchcock himself mastered. But there is inspired humor elsewhere too, coming from the various oddballs that populate the film. Most of the jokes hit, a few miss, and the one sequence in which Brooks and Kahn play a loud, elderly Jewish couple attempting to pass a security checkpoint could have been left on the editing room floor. It's not Young Frankenstein, but it's pretty good Brooks.
The one overriding observation I can make from a Mel Brooks movie is its cheerful spirit. Everyone seems to be having a pretty good time. Even the jokes that bomb come from inspiration. You can't say they didn't try and you can't say Brooks doesn't have the best time trying. It is infectious. How else can movies like Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, and this one work without complete faith in their own lunacy?
In High Anxiety, Brooks plays Dr. Richard Thorndike, who assumes the new role of director of the Institute for the Very, Very Nervous. Almost immediately, he deduces that all is not right with the place. A patient seemingly flashes Morse code at his window and another behaves like a dog right down to lifting his leg to urinate on people. His underlings Nurse Diesel (Leachman) and Dr. Charles Montague (Korman) are hardly trustworthy. They knowingly keep sane people committed to boost the revenue and soon Thorndike will have to be out of the way in order for their cash cow to keep producing.
Diesel and Montague engage in BDSM in which Montague screams so loud he forces Diesel to tell others she has the TV on too loud. Both Leachman and Korman play variations of previous roles in Brooks' films, but they are still hilarious villains. Brooks is more or less the straight man who finds himself as the Innocent Man Wrongly Accused (a Hitchcock favorite plot) when a lookalike shoots someone in broad daylight and forces Thorndike to go on the run. He is soon accompanied by a patient's daughter (Kahn) who is convinced her father is sane and kept imprisoned at the institute.
The plot is only the clothesline on which Brooks hangs the verbal and sight gags. Some are direct parodies of Hitchcock classics, such as a bellboy (Levinson) stabbing Thorndike in the shower with the newspaper Thorndike incessantly requested. It's Psycho, to be sure, but there is a funny payoff. I also like The Birds parody scene in which the birds don't swoop don't and peck out Thorndike's eyes, but crap all over him. Thorndike also suffers from "high anxiety" which is an excuse to parody Vertigo. There is also a funny scene where Thorndike is being attacked in a phone booth and his attempted strangulation is mistaken by Kahn as kinky phone sex.
Aside from To Be or Not To Be (1983), High Anxiety is the last truly consistently funny comedy from Brooks. History of the World Part I (1981) and Spaceballs (1987) had their moments, but never reached the levels of inspiration of Brooks' earlier work. He approaches Hitchcock with true admiration and doesn't take cheap shots. The tone is set early on, following the opening credits, where so much activity occurs in an airport terminal that Brooks observes, "What a dramatic airport."
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