Acclaimed funnyman Mel Brooks presents an outrageous overview of history - from a hilarious send-up of 2001 to the Roman Empire, the French Revolution, and the Spanish Inquisition! Here, Ive waited all my whole life for you and now you dont even want me. Thorndyke also meets Arthur Brisbane, a wealthy industrialist who had a nervous breakdown the year before. However, having said that, you don't even need to have seen a Hitchcock movie to find this one funny. He also wrote, however, that too much of the film "is piddled away with juvenile sex jokes" that "are simply beneath a comic mind as fertile as the one that belongs to Mel Brooks. First he'll have to conquer his own psychological weakness - a dreaded condition called high anxiety, which makes him very, very panicky whenever he's far above the ground, whether in a glass-walled elevator or an upper-story hotel room. Screenplay: Mel Brooks, Ron Clark, Rudy DeLuca, Barry Levinson In a Mama skit on Carol Burnetts variety show she plays Mavis Danton, an actor/director of the local playhouse theater whose claim to fame is her edited-out-of-the-TV-version role in Catwomen on Mars. High Anxiety is Mel Brooks' renowned spoof of over ten Alfred Hitchcock classics, including Psycho, Vertigo, and The Birds. This looks like a failed TV pilot. She coaches Eunice to act a small part filled with numbed despair and doomed frivolity. Later in the show, Kahn plumbed the comic possibilities of Jeanette MacDonald singing ooh. Her first husband had disappeared, but she explains that because he was an illusionist, that was his job. Never as good as my stuff, but pretty damn good. It's this kind of egomania that drives "Anxiety" into the ground. This is Brooks' first film as a producer and first speaking lead role (his first lead role was in Silent Movie). . You could almost take it seriously, except that Brooks is no Jimmy Stewart, and his hysterical comic acting doesn't let you forget this for an instant. 1 watched in the last 24 hours. This aspect of the movie comes from Hitchcock's 1958 Vertigo, starring James Stewart as a detective whose acrophobia kicks in during a rooftop chase, paralyzing him with terror and touching off a murder scheme. 1977 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. Most of the names are borrowed from other Hitchcock films. High Anxiety gets its comic energy largely from the actors, some of whom have multiple Brooks films among their credits: Leachman as the sadistic Nurse Diesel, Korman as the evil Dr. Montague, and Dick Van Patten as the semi-sympathetic Dr. Wentworth, who gets murdered by loud rock'n'roll that makes his ears bleed. Color-94m. With Broadway, vintage horror films, silents and westerns, the range is much broader. He is the TV Editor at Entertainment. It would probably be fair to say that the results are quite mixed, although in fairness even Brooks at his best can be uneven. The picture might have worked (it's a wacky spoof of Hitchcock moments), but not with this cornball script--nor with Brooks in the lead as a vertigo-prone psychiatrist. The movie obviously does not paid psychology very positively as it shows it as sexist and a way to keep patients at the institute beyond their will.