WEDNESDAY
JULY 24
2013

BIANCULLI’S BEST BETS

 

TCM, 8:00 p.m. ET

TCM begins tonight’s all-night salute to Mel Brooks, fittingly, with A Salute to Mel Brooks, a repeat of the entertaining AFI Life Achievement Award special televised last month by sister network TNT. But here, the festivities are presented uninterrupted by commercials, and in a longer, uncut version. And that’s just the start of a Brooks lineup so good that, for the first time in the history of TV Worth Watching, every entry of today’s Bianculli’s Best Bets will be devoted to a single artist network. Thanks for all the laughs, Mel!

 
  
 
 

TCM, 9:30 p.m. ET

This is the first time TCM has shown this 1970 Mel Brooks film – the relatively (and unfairly) overlooked one he directed after The Producers but before Blazing Saddles. It stars Ron Moody and Frank Langella as an unlikely pair of Russians – one man a descendant of royalty, the other a beggar – who team up to find a fortune in jewels, sewn into the cushions of one of a dozen family chairs.  The chair have ended up in various places over the years, and in search of fortune, so do the two men searching for them (and others, including Dom DeLuise as a Russian orthodox priest).
 
  
 
 

TCM, 11:30 p.m. ET

Matthew Buzzell and Kel Symons directed this 2012 documentary, originally shown on public TV, about the durable comedy character embodied by Mel Brooks, in a series of largely improvised conversations between Brook’s 2000 Year Old Man and Carl Reiner’s straight-man interviewer.

 
  
 
 

TCM, 2:00 a.m. ET

One of Mel Brooks’ unqualified masterpieces. This 1974 satire of Universal Studios’ monster movies is brilliant not only because of its hilarious script and riotously funny performances, but because, visually and even tonally, it is so impressively faithful to the original Frankenstein films. Gene Wilder, Cloris Leachman, Marty Feldman, Teri Garr all are a riot – and Peter Boyle as the Creature, singing and dancing a duet with Wilder’s mad doctor, is at the center of one of the funniest scenes in all of movie comedy history. Ooper dooper!

 
  
 
 

TCM, 4:00 a.m. ET

Another unqualified Mel Brooks cinematic masterpiece. This one is from 1968, and stars Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder as Bialystock and Bloom, the Broadway producer and meek accountant who team up to try, on purpose, to create the biggest flop in Broadway history, as part of a complex get-rich scheme. What an idea – and what a musical they come up with! Dick Shawn, Kenneth Mars, Christopher Hewett and Lee Meredith co-star, in this movie that, decades later, inspired one of the biggest hits in Broadway history. That’s karma for you.

 
  
 
 
 
 
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David Bianculli

Founder / Editor

David Bianculli has been a TV critic since 1975, including a 14-year stint at the New York Daily News, and sees no reason to stop now. Currently, he's TV critic for NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and is an occasional substitute host for that show. He's also an author and teaches TV and film history at New Jersey's Rowan University. His 2009 Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of 'The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour', has been purchased for film rights. His latest, The Platinum Age of Television: From I Love Lucy to the Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific, is an effusive guidebook that plots the path from the 1950s’ Golden Age to today’s era of quality TV.