Blazing Saddles

Blazing Saddles

Blazing Saddles
The film Blazing Saddles, 1974, begins with a railroad crew laying down track in the middle of the Wild West. It is soon discovered that the current path that the railroad is taking will lead right through quicksand. The news of the quicksand is relayed to the attorney general of the state Hedley Lamarr. Lamarr is very corrupt and comes up with a scheme to make himself lots of money. He wants to buy huge tracts of land and then re-route the railroad through his land. He will then sell his land back to the railroad at a premium price. There is one problem though. The town of Rock Ridge sets on this land and to buy it, the townspeople must vacate their homes. Lamarr decides to send a gang of thugs to Rock Ridge to terrorize the townspeople, hoping they will be scared and desert the town. This plan does not work. Lamarr then decides to send Black Bart to become the sheriff of the town. Bart is an African American and Lamarr believes by sending him to Rock Ridge, the simple minded townspeople will officially give up. After a shaky start, the townspeople begin to trust Bart. With the help of The Waco Kid, they out smart Lamarr and his gang. They save the town of Rock Ridge and eventually kill Lamarr. Blazing Saddles is a satire of the Western films of the 50s and 60s. The films of that time period danced around race issues and in some cases made racism seem acceptable. Blazing Saddles does not. By using satire, Blazing Saddles confronts and ridicules the racism of the western film genre and time period.
A satire is a literary form where a human or an individual’s vices, follies, abuses or shortcomings are brought to light. It does this by the means of ridicule, derision, irony, parody, or caricature. Though usually funny, the basic point of a satire is to bring about social reform or just social criticism (Satire). In the movie Blazing Saddles, the two most widely used forms of satire are irony and parody and its main targets are the western film...

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