High Anxiety Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Charles M. Young

Critical Essay by Charles M. Young

High Anxiety could well be Brooks' funniest movie yet. The plot is disarmingly rhythmic, sucking you into suspense-movie clichés and then exploding them with a joke…. The camera and the music are also important characters, contributing to several wonderfully surreal gags. Not every joke works: one dissident doctor dies of a brain hemorrhage from listening to rock & roll (now that's offensive, it's been done-before, and the music should have been by Sick Dick and the Volkswagens). The key, I think, is that High Anxiety transcends schtick enough that you are glad when Brooks wins the fight, gets married to Madeline Kahn and lives happily ever after in the suburbs. That's a Brooks trademark that may reflect his own marriage to actress Anne Bancroft and their living happily ever after in the suburbs. Where the satirist Jonathan Swift (also obsessed with bodily orifices) argued for people to live logically, the...
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