You need only be informed that in [High Anxiety] …, Brooks is sending up Alfred Hitchcock, and you will instantly surmise that here, on the last day of the 54-day shoot, he is trying to bury The Birds once and for all. Hitchcock's protagonists suddenly found themselves prey to a swarm of man-pecking birds. In Brooks's version, the psychiatrist-protagonist—"a reincarnation of the classic Hitchcockian hero, the tall, handsome innocent who gradually becomes ensnared in a nefarious plot breaking out all about him," played by Himself—is relaxing on a park bench one afternoon as gradually, one by one, a flock of pigeons convenes on a nearby jungle gym. Gradually, one by one, the birds take off, swoop in low, and strafe. Slowly, calmly, Brooks assesses the situation, rises, begins to walk away, nonchalantly quickens his pace—the birds, in droves now, continue the pursuit—and, finally, breaks into headlong flight, seeking refuge at last in the ill-fated gardener's shed. High Anxiety may not be the first time Brooks has stooled to conquer, but in this scene, he offers one of the most outrageous samples of his mise en merde directorial style.

In the general public imagination, Mel Brooks is perceived as something of a madcap maniac, an image Brooks resents but at the same time helps to foster. In reality, however, his filmmaking persona is anything but out of control. From screenwriting through directing and then editing, Brooks is in complete command of his medium, utterly considered in his deployment of its resources. And the central preoccupation at every stage is vigilant attention to pacing and nuance. In this context, it is not surprising to learn that he first forged into show business as a drummer, snaring out summers in the Catskills. For Brooks, the process of creating a film is entirely one of orchestration, He has an uncanny sense of what will make an audience laugh, and how long and in what manner it will make them laugh. His directing metaphors are often musical: He inserts rests, changes key, quickens tempo, measures out the beat. He directs with an eye to editing, acutely aware of the jokes on either side of the one he is at that moment positing. And the entire process, for all its lunatic jangles, is intensely cerebral. (pp. 35, 37)

Yet High Anxiety displays more than mere technical virtuosity on Brooks's part. As an homage to Alfred Hitchcock, he has had to fashion a film that works simultaneously as a comedy and a suspense thriller, the two elements playing against each other. The stratification of jokes is much more complex than in his earlier efforts, ranging from straight shtick to subtle allusion and on out to blatant parody. The plot and the characters are more boldly drawn and clearly articulated: He is eliciting a wider range of performances from his repertory company of actors….

There is the usual Brooksian mixture of slapstick, snidery, double entendre, and character blitz. But what makes High Anxiety special is its homage to the cinematic style of the master. We know we are in Hitchcock's universe, or why else would our point of view be scrunched below a glass table, looking up at the huge knees and dwarfed faces of the two archvillains as they conspire to yet commit another murder? Hitchcock fans will probably be most titillated by the sidelong tributes to specific films, for the plot, while contained in itself, is continually surfacing, like some stray submarine, in the middle of some other classic Hitchcock movie. The comic impact derives from the shudder of recognition as the Brooks film momentarily tumbles into the Hitchcock, and just as quickly, picks itself up, scrapes off the birdshit, and moves on.

In many ways, High Anxiety may stand, as Brooks insists it does, as his greatest film to date. Nevertheless,… I find myself harboring a grudging reluctance to throw myself wholeheartedly into the chorus of praise. This is partly because High Anxiety continues the string of Brooks parodies of other films. The Producers and, to a lesser extent, The Twelve Chairs, his first two films, seemed somehow extensions of a personal self…. But, starting with Blazing Saddles, and continuing with Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie, and now High Anxiety, Brooks has developed an almost formulaic approach: Unlike The Producers, which he wrote alone, these scripts are the products of television-style brainstorming sessions between shifting collections of comic writers. And they all work primarily as take-offs on earlier, clíché-ridden genres. (p. 37)

The core attribute of Mel Brooks is a sort of hypersensitivity to the outside world. On the one hand, this is reflected in an almost naive celebration, an unmediated delight in the sheer richness of the everyday lifeworld, the human provenance. Here is the source of his richest comedic material, in his extraordinary attention to nuance and detail…. And that anxiety, in turn, skews the artistic production: Trying to please the largest possible audience, he confects another genre parody rather than hazarding a more personal statement. Or within any given film, some small, delicate insight is blasted home, rendered utterly blatant, so that there's no doubt that everyone will get it.

My thoughts drifted to Brooks's extraordinary propensity for metaphors of combat whenever he's discussing his cinematic intentions. The dovetailing between the languages of comedy and violence is by now proverbial: Jokes die; monologues bomb; when successful, comics kill their audiences. But his language is especially charged, and the confrontation seems somehow more personally intense. In a curious sort of way, the audience is forever the potential enemy: At any moment, it could break out in apathy. This danger has to be smashed. The point is not merely to survive but to gain the victory. The explosion he plots is the audience's uncontainable laughter. He triumphs when, momentarily, he utterly disarms his would-be adversaries. His expansive generosity arises simultaneously with his tenacious defensiveness. Perhaps a similar process is at work in the self-exposure of other comedians, but with Brooks its operations are more transparent, and, one imagines, more intense. His comedies only hint at the drama of their creation. (p. 38)