"Dock that Chink a day's pay for napping on the job," a character named Taggart (Slim Pickens) utters in the opening scene of the film thereby establishing the irreverent tone of this Mel Brooks comedy. Not only is it interested in ignoring what's generally considered to be good taste, it's silly orientation, physical humor and outright idiocy sustain it through 93-minutes length to deliver complete one of the most famous of screen comedies ever produced.

Tagged with the suggestion to, "Never give a saga an even break!" Blazing Saddles strips the western mythology and serves it up for ridicule without ever once batting an eye or trying to affirm the articles of faith upon which the genre is built. From its ludicrous setting in a town filled with people of the same surname, Johnson, to the manifest destiny of railroad expansion nominally the cause of all on-screen action, Brooks's movie is more a revolving platter for jokes and gags than it's any kind of sustained story-telling and that's precisely the point.

His brand of comedy is not concerned with complexity, literary quality or subtlety. It is only interested in the basics of characterization and stereotype and only to the extent such material remains the foundation of steady stream of jokes and potty humor.

Centered on the good-natured Bart (Cleavon Little), Blazing Saddles takes its plot line from the efforts of Hedley Lemar (Harvey Korman), a local politico who seeks control of a frontier town. After the town's sheriff is killed he arranges for the inept, cross-eyed Governor (Mel Brooks) to name Bart to the job even though he is, after all, a black man in a town filled with gun toting, racist white people. All subsequent action is centered on Lemar's attempts to undermine and kill Bart before devolving into a meta-commentary, if the word serves its purpose, as the film's actors race off their set into the movie-within-the-movie's set, much to the chagrin of a director (Dom DeLuise) attempting to control the entire production.

Likely a parallel for Brooks's experience shooting the movie, any attempt to describe what Blazing Saddles is about misses the point entirely. Not particularly noted for its storytelling or plot consistencies it is better known for some its scenes and more than a few of its songs and jokes.

Foremost among them is the farting serenade of cowpokes on the open range eating beans and singing campfire songs. By turning the cowboy myth of frontier comforts on its ear the familiar scene of relaxing workmen taking a meal and enjoying their masculine company is given an air of plausibility when remembering all the many campfire scenes in all the hundreds of western movies and TV shows that have come before. Farting as the logical outcome of consuming quantities of legumes was never before scene as a likable screen subject, though we know from real-life experience it almost can't be avoided, let alone an object of ridicule and so the sequence has been held up through years of repetition to become a classic of screen comedy.

The movie's musical numbers are also worth remembering with their double meanings, risqué subjects and humor somehow aimed at an adolescent understanding of anatomy even while being enacted by adults without any self-consciousness or fear. In the role of chanteuse Lili Von Shtupp, Madeline Kahn is particularly convincing in this style of relatively good clean fun because the jokes she partakes in, while occasionally flat or now historically uninteresting, are always told in convincing fashion and without hesitation. Her performance, in particular, is a standard for double entendre and it won her an Academy Award nomination.

While 1974 was a year recognized more for its sober dramas like The Godfather Part II and Lenny than for its ability to laugh at itself, Blazing Saddles was a rare bird indeed. Striking the irons as Brooks's first movie hit, the aging Jewish jokester was made a national celebrity and parlayed his spoofing style into the horror genre later that same year with Young Frankenstein and then later on in other forms like the thriller films of Alfred Hitchcock with High Anxiety.

What's startling now is how dated and old-fashioned Blazing Saddles seems when reviewed today. Its casualness about saying "nigger", having characters ogle at women's breasts, its portrayal of people with absolutely no psychological depth possibly nostalgic for older comic forms, at best, or patently offensive and boring, at worst.

In a time of renewed celebration of Mel Brooks with Broadway's adaptation of his movie The Producers, though, and through the resurgence of physical comedy with the rise of gross-out teen comedies, Blazing Saddles rings as an important movie in motion picture history. This statement, of course, comes not from the words of a fan but rather from the echo of memory's reminder when my childhood friends and family members recited, line-by-line, entire sequences from the picture's many comic sequences to form part of the soft palate of my youth.

While adulthood helps me recognize the value of pointing out Richard Pryor's involvement in writing the film, let alone the fact he was set to star as Bart before his caustic and race-centered stand-up comedy scared off backers, the child in me remembers when such considerations didn't matter. Instead, all that was important was getting away with making fart noises in mixed company and, somehow, that's the signal importance of Brooks's film.

It may not be a classic in the way we're used to discussing, or eulogizing Citizen Kane or Stagecoach, but it does form the foundation for many people who know movies as a reminder of their right to enjoy silliness and idiocy without unnecessary guilt. I second the notion but recognize my taste has changed with the passing of years since 1974.