The Talkies
Stein, Benjamin
"The Talkies" Stavisky & Young Frankenstein We are haunted by what we are and what we might be. We see all around us the evidence of the fluidity and impermanence of life, and it frightens us, and gives us hope....
...Then he pauses a moment and goes into a frenzy...
...Running parallel with the story of Stavisky's last months is a story of the arrival of the exiled Trotsky in France...
...He came from nowhere—his parents were Jewish emigres from Russia— to sit with Cabinet members and nobility...
...He had managed an empire of bonds and nightspots based largely on the equivalent of check kiting and fraud...
...We are poor and see that we might be rich, or weak and perhaps powerful, and the contrasts give us obsessions and also sustenance...
...Or when Igor has stolen the wrong kind of brain, Dr...
...Stavisky, at his most fundamental, was a failed existentialist...
...We see the power of money operating through the government, the press, the organs of justice...
...At a slightly deeper level, the story is a social one...
...it is a scream...
...The movie about him works on threelevels, all of them executed extremely successfully...
...For instance, Dr...
...When other people cheat him and betray him, though, Stavisky is shocked and outraged...
...The movie is that rare breed—intensely interesting and entertaining, and thoroughly instructive...
...At the most superficial level, the movie is a fashion show...
...Like Brooks' earlier movies, Young Frankenstein is full of jokes...
...When they fall, we feel it keenly, just as we feel uneasy when someone seemingly healthier than us falls gravely ill...
...It really was not a whole movie...
...Madeline Kahn makes a wonderful Jewish princess who tries to keep the monster from raping her but who then, because of his monstrous proportions, falls in love with him...
...At the end, it was almost incredibly sophomoric...
...Poverty coexists with riches both in real life and in our thoughts, and we look with longing upon those who seem not only to get along in the midst of this confusion, but also to thrive on it...
...We see, in short, the awfully repulsive milieu in which Stavisky lived...
...But at the deepest level, Stavisky is a film that plays on existentialist themes...
...He should have known better...
...The Producers had a funny idea, but it became a collection of more and more in-jokey gags which finally ended without much point...
...It hangs together...
...Based on the Son of Frankenstein story, Brooks' movie stars Gene Wilder as an American teaching physician who is a grandson of the Baron Frankenstein...
...Blazing Saddles had the same problem...
...Young Frankenstein is not the definitive spoof of the horror film genre, but it is a very good one...
...The director, Alain Resnais, is one of the few authentic geniuses operating in the world of film, and he plumbs deep into our fears of existence and tells us how we should not react...
...The movie is shot beautifully and every frame is a joy to behold...
...Frankenstein thinks his experiment has failed...
...Stavisky, a new import from France, is the story of a man who, for a time, seemed buoyed up by the very currents ofuncertainty that weigh the rest of us down, but who finally succumbed to them in the most severe way possible...
...it works...
...Young Frankenstein is an imperfect film and no work of lasting greatness, but it is funny while you watch it, and even, in contrast with Brooks' other movies, for a few hours afterwards...
...He thought that since there was no heavenly or worldly force preventing him from cheating and stealing, that he might as well cheat and steal as not...
...Or we are rich and think that we might be poor, powerful but perhaps weak, and the contrasts make us afraid...
...When confronted with the failure of a truly grand and enormous project (in a physical and not a moral sense), namely the Russian Revolution, Trotsky withdrew and continued to fight for what he wanted, without being surprised at anything...
...It is extremely interesting to notice how similar the humor of Young Frankenstein is to that of television shows...
...At a time when the whole Western world was locked in depression and poverty, he lived it up with a lavishness that would make Jackie Onassis envious...
...There is Cloris Leachman as the incredibly severe housekeeper, Frau Blucher, whose very name makes the horses shiver...
...But its main character has a certain kindly lunatic qualityabout him that makes the story whole...
...Jean-Paul Bel-mondo is a wonderfully mobile and sympathetic Stavisky...
...It is television humor at its most evanescent, yet it works...
...We do not need to see the contrast with the clothes, cars, and interiors of most people to know that what we have seen is all the more lush because of the comparison...
...Mel Brooks, a writer and comedian of great ability, has always had difficulty in keeping his directorial efforts from simply falling apart...
...Stavisky, the sharpie and con man, was an idealist about other people, while Trotsky, the idealist and revolutionary, was a realist about what life held...
...Rather it was a collection of jokes which were sometimes individually funny, but did not hold together...
...A further reason to see Stavisky is that Stavisky's wife, Arlette, is beautiful beyond words...
...Frankenstein says he will not be mad at him but then starts to strangle him...
...Stavisky was a French swindler and confidence man who became one of France's most powerful men during the Third Republic and who caused a tremendous furor when he fell...
...He recognized no moral imperatives in his dealings with others...
...He says calmly that scientists sometimes fait...
...We see the anti-Semitism of even Stavisky's closest friends, who tell him that when he falls they will say that they had been misled and should have known better than to associate with rootless cosmopolitan Jews...
...He shows us that people whom we might have considered successful do not really know how to cope...
...Wilder inherits his grandfather's castle in Transylvania and is impelled into working to bring the dead back to life...
...The sumptuousness of life among those who have a lot of money when most people have none is graphically brought across by the clothes, the cars, the interiors in which Stavisky and his crowd operated...
...The staple of television humor is the deflation of an attitude...
...Its meaning is rather obscure, but is probably that Trotsky did know how to cope...
...It tells about the corruption and decadence of life in the Third Republic...
...it is a funny fictional snatch of biography...
...He says he will be stoic...
...We see that Stavisky's legal troubles resulted not from perfection of the legal system, but from the use of that system by people with political ends—people trying to make political capital out of exposing competitors involved with Stavisky...
...It says that when people live in a world in which there is nothing but random chance, they should not be surprised at what happens...
...He gambled away millions while other people who came from his background starved...
...It is not a nightclub act...
...There are hilarious supporting characters such as the hunchbacked Igor, played by Marty Feldman, whose hump keeps changing sides...
...Now Brooks has made Young Frankenstein...
Vol. 8 • March 1975 • No. 6
