Movie a Day Blog is a big fan of Mel Brooks, but a recent  viewing of HIGH ANXIETY (1977) proved it to be less funny than remembered. Brooks is having fun with every Alfred Hitchcock stereotype and cliché in HIGH ANXIETY, and for film buffs it’s a sumptuous feast. But the actual laughs are fewer and far between, and everyone in the movie mugs unmercifully, no one more than headliner Brooks as Dr. Richard Thorndyke (sound familiar to fans of NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959) ?).  He plays a psychiatrist from Harvard who has come to take over the Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous in California. Brooks and his cohorts take every opportunity available for a gag – when a particularly ominous musical cue is summoned up, it turns out to come from a passing bus carrying a full orchestra. The usual Brooks stock company is present: Harvey Korman as a rival psychiatrist, Cloris Leachman as the dangerously busty Nurse Diesel, and Howard Morris as a ditzy Austrian shrink, called Professor Lilloman. Much of the inspiration for HIGH ANXIETY comes directly from Hitchcock’s VERTIGO (1958), since Brooks suffers from acrophobia and he is placed in plenty of situations that leave him paralyzed with fear, and always in danger of falling into the classic Hollywood vortex shot. There are Noir lighting setups that lead a character to worry that “I think I’m caught in a web,” and in one scene, a message is left for Brooks from Mr. Macguffin, the term Hitchcock used for the plot motivating device that had no real meaning of its own. We can say that about HIGH ANXIETY in general – while it’s funny to spot one Hitchcock reference after another, HIGH ANXIETY is less successful than Brooks’ stronger concept comedies such as BLAZING SADDLES (1974) and THE PRODUCERS (1968). Those films were really about something: racism in the Old West, the compulsion to hustle and defraud, and both films explore the bounds of friendship and dependence. HIGH ANXIETY has no such pretensions, which may be a good thing but would have been even better if the jokes were funnier. There are brilliant sequences, such as filming a scene with Leachman and Korman from below a glass coffee table, the camera constantly being blocked as the table is filled or cleared. The parody of BIRDS is also inventive, but these are one-look jokes that don’t have as much comic potential as the typical Brooks nuttiness as his other films. HIGH ANXIETY is still enjoyable and amusing, and it’s worth it to see Brooks sing the title song and crack the microphone cord as if it’s a whip. But in the canon of the funniest Mel Brooks’ movies, it doesn’t hold a candle to his other 1970s comedies, particularly BLAZING SADDLES and YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN.