THE BIG LESSON

Steyn's Song Of The Week: 43) WE'LL BE TOGETHER AGAIN by Carl Fischer and Frankie Laine (Mark Steyn)

In the Seventies, he got a call from some guy he'd never heard of who was making a western and figured it wouldn't be the real deal unless he had Frankie Laine for the theme song. After all, Laine had sung over the titles of Gunfight At The OK Corral, 3.10 To Yuma, Bullwhip and The Hanging Tree, not to mention Rawhide on TV week after week. So Laine went into the studio and sang:

He rode a blazing saddle
He wore a shining star
His job to offer battle
To bad men near and far...

That's such a lovely American rhyme - "saddle" and "baddle". And made for Frankie Laine, who in "High Noon" was famously torn between "doody" and his "fair-haired byoody". The guy Laine had never heard of was a fellow called Mel Brooks. When I asked him about the song a few years back, he told me he wrote it with Frankie Laine in mind but that he never told him the film was a comedy. That's what makes it such a great performance - Laine's singing this thing for real:

He conquered fear and he conquered hate
He turned dark night into day
He made his blazing saddle
A torch to light the way...

And, given some of the lyrics he had million-selling blockbusters with, why would Laine ever have suspected the above might have been pastiche? These days, if you hail him for breaking new ground, Mel Brooks will demur and claim no more than that he broke new wind. In fact, Blazing Saddles, like many Brooks movies, breaks a lot of old wind: the one fragrant exception is Mel's musical moments. In Saddles, as in Young Frankenstein and High Anxiety and even Space Balls, the truly dotty comic inspiration is in the songs. I pointed out that "saddle/baddle" pairing and Brooks told me he did it to sound authentically western: it's the kind of detail you find in Mel's songs rather than his scripts. There's a big lesson in Frankie Laine's performance of the theme: the funniest comedy is always deadly serious.