Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Overlooked Movies: The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother

Can you make a Mel Brooks movie without Brooks' involvement?  That seems to be the question Gen Wilder wanted to answer with The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother.  Wilder had worked with Brooks in several earlier movies (The Twelve Chairs, The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein), so maybe he thought he had things figured out.

He didn't, not really, but he came close enough to make this worth watching if you're into off-the-wall humor and slapstick.  Which I am.  Scroll down to the trailer and watch it.  If you get a laugh from that, you'll get even more from the movie.

The smartest thing Wilder did was hire some of the cast members from other Brooks movies: Madeline Kahn, Marty Feldman, and Dom DeLouise.  They're all very funny in this one.  Wilder wrote the script himself, and that's a problem. It's goofy, all right, but it doesn't work as well as Brooks' best scripts do.  It has some very funny moments, but it doesn't hang together (not that all of Brooks' do, either).  

I remember that Judy and I took the kids to see this one in the theater a long time ago.  They loved one particular scene and giggled about it all the way home.  It's in the trailer, but you don't get to see what they found so funny.  Too bad.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

meh


Jeff

Todd Mason said...

Better, I suspect, than THE WORLD'S GREATEST LOVER...I haven't seen Wilder's Mycroft film yet, but saw the other Way too often as something on the first month we had HBO in '79. (We had just moved to Hawaii, were living in a one-bedroom apartment with my brother and I sharing a foldout couch bed in the living room, and we didn't get a house for a couple of months...so, if anyone else wanted to see HBO, I either sat through it, or went down to the lobby or out to the secondhand book/record store Froggies.) But was it as good as (the solid if not superb) SILVER STREAK?

mybillcrider said...

It falls way short of Silver Streak, I think.

Toby O'B said...

Well, the trailer had my favorite moment - the pay-off to the stagecoach fight scene with Wilder and the under-rated Roy Kinnear....

And 'Silver Streak' has, for me, the greatest confrontation scene between villain and heroes. (Or at least the best line ever from such a scene.....)