High Anxiety marks Mel Brooks’ first talking role. He’s fine as the centerpiece of the movie, mining lots of humor from his deadpan reactions to the craziness around him.

Cloris Leachman is the funniest member of the cast as the evil Nurse Diesel. I’ve never been a Leachman fan, but her performance here is essential, sickly sexy and perfectly understated.

Madeline Kahn is less funny than in other Mel Brooks movies, but strong nonetheless.

Harvey Korman – a terrific comic actor – is sickly brilliant as a conniving psychiatrist with a dark side.

Notable Supporters

• Dick Van Patten as a traumatized psychiatrist: Van Patten was all over 1970s TV and movies.
• Charlie Callas as a psychiatric patient who thinks he’s a Cocker Spaniel
• Barry Levinson, a co-writer of High Anxiety and later Hollywood bigwig, as a Bellboy

Mel Brooks produced, directed, cowrote and starred in High Anxiety. His personal anxiety was reduced when it brought in 10x its production cost. He was thus a Macher, a Hollywood success!

Lots of crazed behavior and lots of fave scenes, though probably fewer for me than hardcore fans. Mine:

• Ink down the drain instead of blood, tweaking Psycho
• Psychiatrist convention at the San Fran Hyatt Regency in Embarcadero Center when it was new: banners of great shrinks hang from the ceiling, including FREUD, JUNG & BROTHERS, as in Dr. Joyce Brothers. That’s funny, especially in ’77.