Marijuana Cures Alcoholism In Blazing Saddles

     In Mel Brooks' 1974 roast of all westerns Blazing Saddles the character Jim goes through a transformation. When we first meet Jim (Gene Wilder), formerly known as the Waco Kid, he is an alcoholic who guzzles hard alcohol as soon as he wakes up, and his shooting hand is shaky. After Sheriff Bart (Cleavon Little) hands him a hand rolled cigarette he takes a drag and then speaks in a high-pitched tone of voice, which is to indicate that he is, "hit-holding," unique to marijuana among all drugs in the world that are smoked.

     The next day Jim shaves while smoking marijuana, and after that he is never seen drinking hard alcohol again. He's seen sharing hand rolled cigarettes with Sheriff Bart and hit-holding a few more times. The next time he's seen drinking alcohol in the sheriff's office he's sitting at the desk apparently sober and drinking a beer, and he gets another beer along with Bart when they go to see Lili Von Shtüpp, but barely touches it.

     Later in the movie Jim is not seen to drink any alcohol, and instead is seen to shoot the guns out of the hands of an entire group of bad guys after one of them recognizes him and says, "Don't pay no attention to that alkie. He can't even hold a gun, much less shoot it." After which Sheriff Bart asks for a round of applause for, "the Waco Kid." And later Jim shoots a bundle of dynamite from the top of a hill with his pistol in one shot. What happened to Jim that allowed him to become the Waco Kid again?

     Marijuana maintenance therapy, that's what happened. Somehow Bart had an endless supply of marijuana that he was able to share with Jim, which is potentially period accurate. When marijuana was made illegal in the United States around 50 years after the movie was set in the 1870s the specific reason given in the closed session of Congress was that black men would smoke it with their white daughters and get them to sleep with them, indicating that black males were the only known marijuana smokers in the 1920s.

     While it is not generally a recognized therapy for getting people to stop drinking alcohol, marijuana has been used by alcoholics to stop drinking, and since Mel Brooks is not known to have ever been a marijuana smoker, this may have come from Richard Pryor, a co-writer of Blazing Saddles who was originally set to play Sheriff Bart. Wherever it came from it is the only reference to an alcoholic breaking his habit by switching to marijuana that I'm aware of in all of movie history. And just like Cleavon Little replaced Richard Pryor due to some other movie obligation, Gene Wilder was brought in to replace Gig Young, an actor hired to play the alcoholic Jim who was an actual alcoholic that tried quitting to take the role of Jim and suffered from the DTS on the set. 

     Next year Blazing Saddles will be 50 years old. Is it the greatest comedy in the history of the world? Some say it's in the top 10, and I agree. I also think that it is Mel Brooks' magnum opus, his greatest work. Is it non-stop politically incorrect with racial slurs? Of course, but the dialogue is actually period accurate, and as Mel Brooks said, he heard from African Americans that no one was offended by his use of the n-word, they understood it within the movie, and every single occurrence had either been written by or approved by Richard Pryor anyway. The entire movie is about how racism is bad, and how racism is only in the minds of stupid people.

     The people of the town of Rock Ridge all have the same last name, Johnson, which can be seen hanging on the wall in the town council chamber. Get it? The entire town is descended from just one family, indicating that they are all mentally retarded because they are inbred. And for no reason other than to point this out and to be funny all dialogue that refers to people in the town uses both their first and last names.

     Racism and prejudice against certain groups was not limited to African Americans in the 1870s, and the ignorance of prejudice was shown best when the people of Rock Ridge decided that they would give some land to the railroad workers for helping them to build the fake town overnight, but not to all of them. Most TV broadcasts of the movie were unwatchable over the years because the funny was removed when they removed the words that were offensive to people that had no sense of humor. The line goes, (Olson Johnson) "All right! We'll give some land to the n*ggers and the Chinks... but we don't want the Irish!" 

     For anyone that hasn't seen it, you have to see an unadulterated copy, it's extremely difficult to find, because most showings on television over the last 50 years have removed some or all of the dialogue and sounds. About a third of the lines delivered by Taggart (Slim Pickens) have something offensive in them, and his character is bleeped the most, meaning he has some of the funniest lines in the entire movie.

     First in the '80s they removed the fart noises from the bean-eating scene and a few other words, but left in the n-word, then over the decades in an attempt to protect the sensibilities of every protected group, every potentially offensive word was removed from most showings on television. I was able to record it off of IFC ("No beeps. No blurs. All movie.") which doesn't edit the movies, and was able to fast forward through the commercials, which is about as good as you can get these days. I'm looking forward to the day where I can record it off of TCM, which not only doesn't edit for content but also doesn't insert commercials.