I must, alas, be the onion in this petunia patch of praise. I too had tears in my eyes in the first ten minutes of this movie, tears of disappointment. And I have to confess I probably shouldn't be reviewing this because I didn't watch the whole movie; the first ten minutes was all I could stand before I shut it off. What with great comic lights like Marty Feldman, Gene Wilder, Dom Deluise, and Madeline Kahn involved, plus Wilder's writing talents, I expected at least a couple of chuckles when I taped this off the Encore channel. But the humor - what little there was - was so lame, so forced, so 'scheisslich', as the Germans might say, that I finally wondered why I wasn't using my time for more constructive things, like cleaning the garage. The business, for instance of Sigerson "testing" the supposed Bessie Bellwood on her knowledge of music hall songs in order to disprove her assumed identity was not only embarassingly weak, it went on painfully too long. This was matched by the inanity of Sgt. Sacker's slapping his head to restart the message that Sigerson keeps interrupting. This travesty is simply in a different league altogether from "Young Frankenstein". To paraphrase Dorothy Parker's barb at Katherine Hepburn, the movie covered the whole comic range from A to B. Avoid it.
