This month marks 52 years since the Mel Brooks comedy Blazing Saddles rode into theaters and tore Westerns a new one.
Blazing Saddles is also one of the crown jewels in the film library of Warner Bros. Pictures that young movie lovers may have missed.
Watch With Us has selected Blazing Saddles as the one great movie you need to watch before it leaves HBO Max in March 2026.
Before we share the reasons to watch it, everyone should know that the film has very NSFW language that wouldn’t fly in 2026. But it remains a classic nevertheless, a movie that still has the power to make you laugh and shock you at the same time.
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Cleavon Little Is Terrific in the Lead Role
The lore behind Blazing Saddles holds that cowriter Richard Pryor was rejected by the studio and prevented from playing the leading role of Bart. Whatever the reasons behind that decision, it gave Cleavon Little the role of his lifetime and his best-known part. Pryor would have been hilarious as Bart as well, but within his established persona. Little didn’t have the same kind of reputation ahead of time, and he made the role his own.
In the film, Little plays Bart like a live-action Bugs Bunny as he continuously outsmarts his enemies and even the racists in town, who freaked out because he was a Black sheriff. The most impressive thing about Little’s performance is how easy he makes it look. He doesn’t twist his character’s persona into different shapes for the sake of a joke; he just makes the comedy work for himself.
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Brooks is a legendary comedy director, and he brought his signature touch to this film while surrounding Little with established performers. Pryor’s frequent costar Gene Wilder had a great turn as Bart’s friend and ally, Jim the Waco Kid. But two of the very funniest roles belong to Alex Karras and Madeline Kahn, both of whom play initially villainous characters.
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Kahn received a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her turn as Lili Von Shtupp, a woman who was hired to seduce Bart. Karras had a larger role as the dim-witted henchman Mongo, who’s oddly endearing and turns out to be a good ally to Bart and Jim. Brooks cast himself as Governor William J. Le Petomane and played two other minor roles, and he kept the film’s comedy coming at a relentless pace. Blazing Saddles never seems to run out of jokes, and it’s earned its reputation as one of the funniest comedies ever made.
‘Blazing Saddles’ Defies All Conventions in a Wild Final Act
The final act of Blazing Saddles has to be seen to be believed. But the shorter way of putting it is that Brooks and company came up with such a bonkers conclusion that the film stops pretending that it isn’t a movie. The fourth wall is repeatedly broken, and the action can’t even be contained on the set of Blazing Saddles.
It’s not as if Blazing Saddles was a serious Western through the first two-thirds of the film, but there’s something gleefully hilarious in the way it drops all pretense in the final third. That’s a trick Brooks has used more than once, but never as effectively as here.
Blazing Saddles is streaming on HBO Max.
