HIGH ANXIETY had fans of 1974’s hits Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein hoping Mel Brooks 1977 sendup of classic Alfred Hitchcock thrillers would be as hilarious and endearing. It drew mixed reviews and paid back a $4,000,000 tab with $31,100,000, the year’s 28th spot on the earner roll. The year before Brooks had starred in, co-written & directed Silent Movie, a satiric homage to pre-sound films, which pleased critics and did well at the box office. That one left us silently grimacing rather than merrily grinning, and we regrettably also take the low road on ‘High’.  Solid work from Madeline Kahn and Cloris Leachman win chuckles, but mostly the diagnosis is a case of TMM—too much Mel. Besides starring, producing & directing, Brooks co-wrote with Ron Clark, Rudy De Luca and Barry Levinson, all of whom have small supporting parts. The Hitch hits kidded include Spellbound, Vertigo, North By Northwest, Psycho and The Birds. 

In southern California psychoanalyst ‘Dr. Richard Thorndyke’ (Brooks) takes charge of the ‘Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous’, replacing the previous administrator who died mysteriously. The staff includes ‘Dr. Charles Montague’ (Harvey Korman), his dominatrix girlfriend ‘Nurse Charlotte Diesel’ (Leachman) and ‘Professor Vicktor Lillolman’ (Howard Morris), Thorndyke’s old mentor. On a trip to a shrink’s convention in San Francisco, Thorndyke meets ‘Victoria Brisbane’ (Kahn), who suspects that her father is being kept at the institute against his will.

Affection for the teased movies is a given—the show starts with a dedication to Hitchcock—and many of the setups are clever, but Brooks can’t resist running a gag into analysis the ground, and after twenty or thirty minutes fatigue sets in, with another hour to go. As other observers noted, along with mystery, suspense, romance and jolts, Hitchcock’s movies had sly humor built in, so this comes off like the spy spoofs that kidded Bond, whose adventures were self-aware about their unreality to start with.

In there trying are Dick Van Patten, Ron Carey (pushed into irritating), Charlie Callas (wasted), Jack Riley, Richard Stahl, Robert Ridgely, Albert Whitlock, Billy Sands and Frank Campanella. 94 minutes.