High Anxiety

Doctor Richard Thorndyke arrives as the new head of a psychiatric institute on a clifftop above the ocean. He suffers from a fear of heights. When he works out that some of the staff are defrauding the families of wealthy patients, he becomes the target. Mel Brooks directed and starred, with Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman and Harvey Korman in the cast. It opened at Christmas 1977 and took 31.1 million dollars against a 4 million budget. The film points straight at Hitchcock, parodying Spellbound, Vertigo, Psycho and The Birds in particular. The dream sequence answers Spellbound, the tower answers Vertigo and the shower curtain answers Psycho. The best story concerns Hitchcock himself. He watched it at a private screening and left without saying a word. He then sent Brooks wine with a note calling it a small token of his pleasure and telling him to have no anxiety about this. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 72 percent, the consensus calling it a minor classic in the Brooks canon while some critics found it uneven. Roger Ebert pointed at the difficulty: Hitchcock's films are often funny themselves, and satire works best when its target is self-important. Who it is for: viewers who know Hitchcock and like Brooks's parodies. Who it is not for: anyone who does not recognise the references. Most of the jokes depend on remembering the original scene, and without that the film falls flat.