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Comedian and director’s picks for American Cinematheque series range from Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights to Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit
Twenty of Mel Brooks’ favorite films of the past century will be screening this fall in Los Angeles, as part of a film series the 100-year-old comedian and director programmed himself.
The American Cinematheque, Los Angeles’ year-round nonprofit film festival, worked with Brooks to put together his favorites list, which starts with Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, from 1931, and ends with Jojo Rabbit, Taika Waititi’s 2019 dark comedy about a Nazi-era German boy who has Adolf Hitler as his imaginary friend.
“For the first time, Brooks is publicly sharing his favorites, with the series offering unique insight into his knowledge and appreciation of film history spanning the last century,” the American Cinematheque said in its description of the series. The event was organized in honor of Brooks’ 100th birthday, which fell this 28 June.
The series does not include any of Brooks’ most famous films, such as The Producers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Spaceballs or Robin Hood: Men in Tights.
In fact, Brooks’ list of favorites, which ranges from major classics such as Double Indemnity and Psycho to big-budget musicals and niche comedies, includes only one of his own movies, The Twelve Chairs, which was perhaps his “biggest commercial flop”, and one he has continued to urge more people to watch.
The list also includes only two films made in the past 25 years: Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit and 2019’s Dolemite Is My Name, a biopic of the Black comedian and filmmaker Rudy Ray Moore, starring Eddie Murphy. Other than those two, the most recent film on the list is from 1994.
A representative for Brooks did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Chris LeMaire, the director of programming at the American Cinematheque, told the Los Angeles Times that Brooks’ choice of films evolved over several days, as the centenarian called his assistant with updates, and his assistant emailed the Cinamethque with new suggestions to add to the list. Brooks did not provide an explanation for his choices.
With the 20 films he ultimately chose, Brooks is “providing a little bit of a skeleton key into his own biography”, said Jeremy Dauber, a professor of Yiddish at Columbia University and one of the comedian’s biographers.
The list emphasizes many of Brooks’ “familial and personal relationships”, as well as his artistic influences, Dauber added, showing “the kind of real mensch that Brooks is at this point in his career”.
Brooks’ final selections, which is nearly all American films, includes formative works that debuted in his childhood and youth, Dauber said, from comedies by Chaplin and the Marx Brothers to examples of “the big movie musical”: Fred Astaire’s Top Hat (1935) and Broadway Melody of 1940, from that year.
Then there’s the thread of Brooks’ social consciousness, in the film version of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, as well as some of the films he spoofed, including Psycho, one of the inspiration for Brooks’ 1977 Hitchcock parody, High Anxiety.
A semi-autobiographical Federico Fellini film from 1953, I Vitelloni, adds a dash of Italian cinema to the mix.
