WARNING: SPOILERS

I’ve seen this documentary twice already and I’m sure I’ll watch it again. It’s a sweet doc about a sweet man who was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood when I was coming of age. And he was totally unique. He didn't look like a traditional leading man, his hair went everywhere, but there he was again—starring in another box-office smash.

And not just starring. Here’s some of the stuff, per the doc, that Gene Wilder brought to his films. These were his ideas:

• Willie Wonka’s intro: the cane getting stuck in the cobblestone leading to the fall and—alley oop—the summersault. From then on, he said, you never knew what was real or fake about the guy.
• “Puttin’ on the Ritz” in “Young Frankenstein.” Mel Brooks was against it—he wanted a truer James Whale homage—but admits he was wrong here. “It’s the best thing in the movie,” he says.
• The very idea of “Young Frankenstein.” I always assumed it sprung from Brooks’ mind, part of his great satires/homages of great Hollywood genres: westerns, silents, Hitchcock. Nope. It was part of Wilder’s satires/homages: Frankenstein, Sherlock Holmes, Valentino.

Spinoffs were big in the 1970s and they kept spinning off writer-directors from Mel Brooks’ universe, including Wilder, but one wonders if they should have. They were stronger together. “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein” were the second- and third-biggest box-office hits of 1974, and beloved to this day, but then each of the elements went off to do their own thing. Gene wrote and directed “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother” and “The World’s Greatest Lover” and those were meh, Marty Feldman did his “Beau Geste” remake, another meh, and even Mel with “Silent Movie” and “High Anxiety” became a bit meh.

And then Gene teamed up with Richard Pryor and became a smash again. He was always partnering with people, wasn’t he? First Mel, then Richard, then Gilda. That describes most of his theatrical releases.

Here’s a shocker: He has just 37 credits on IMDb, including television. He was huge for an actor with just 37 credits.

His life as a dog
Gene’s childhood in Milwaukee in the 1940s reminds me a bit of the Swedish film “My Life as a Dog.” Ingemar’s mom was terminally ill, he tried to make her laugh, but he was still too much trouble and had to be sent away. Gene’s mom wasn’t terminal but she had heart trouble and a doctor told a young Gene that he should never make her angry; that it might kill her. So he tried to make her laugh. And became funny. And bottled up everything. 

He met Mel through Anne Bancroft. Wilder was cast (he uses the term “miscast”) in a small role in the 1963 Broadway production of “Mother Courage and Her Children,” starring Bancroft, and Bancroft thought he would be perfect for the role of the innocent accountant in that new movie Mel was writing. Mel met him and agreed. The producers, of course, wanted a handsome leading man for this part, but Mel did his usual chicanery: “Great idea, boss!” he said, and then ignored them until it was too late to change anything.

On IMDb, there’s a three-year gap between “The Producers” and “Start the Revolution Without Me.” Was Wilder doing stage work? The doc doesn’t help us. Alan Alda and Harry Connick Jr. are talking heads here, longtime friends of Gene’s, but we get no indication how they became so. Worse (for me), we don’t get Wilder’s longtime attorney and friend, Eric Weissmann, whom I interviewed back in 2011. Was he unavailable? I remember asking him who was funnier, Mel or Gene, and he paused. Not to think it over, but because—I think—he’d never heard such a stupid question. The answer is Mel and it wasn’t a contest. Mel was one of the funniest people alive. Gene could be funny, as we see, but it wasn’t his default mode.

We get some of “Willie Wonka” but not enough, and nobody underlines the fact that this actor, so sweet and innocent, could play demonic so well. That’s what stunned me when I saw “Willie Wonka” again as an adult in the 1990s: how uncompromising Gene is in his performance; how much he doesn’t care if we like him. There should’ve been more roles like that for him.

For the Pryor-Wilder teamups, “Silver Streak” is given short shrift here while the doc is all over “See No Evil, Hear No Evil.” I get it: Rain Pryor, one of the doc's talking heads, was on the set for the latter, and it’s also where Gene met his second wife, another talking head. They have stories about “See No Evil.” But it was a bad movie that had no cultural impact. “Silver Streak” was huge at both the box office and in our imaginations. So was “Stir Crazy.”

Here’s how the Pryor-Wilder teamups did at the box office, along with their B.O. ranking for the year:

• “Silver Streak” (1974): $51m, 4th
• “Stir Crazy” (1980): $101m, 3rd
• “See No Evil, Hear No Evil” (1989): $46m, 27th
• “Another You” (1991): $2m, 137th

I just realized: Did they shy from “Silver Streak” because of the blackface scene? I recently rewatched the film. There’s nothing embarrassing about that scene 50 years later. It’s subterfuge, and the joke is on the white protagonist (a bit), but mostly on the white police force who can’t see past the black. The thing that’s truly dated in the movie is the ’70s swinger vibe. Horrible dialogue and Jill Clayburgh is given nothing to do. But it would’ve been nice if someone here had talked about the film.

Encore
I feel like a dick complaining—it’s such a fun documentary, totally in my wheelhouse. Anytime I can hear Mel Brooks tell stories, I’m there. I also found it lovely seeing Peter Ostrum, Charlie from “Willie Wonka,” as a seemingly well-adjusted adult. That was his only film role, it turns out. It was huge, but he just said, “Well, that was fun. Bye.” He became a animal vet.

The stuff about Gene’s Alzheimer’s is tough to watch but worthwhile and not without grace moments. His wife talks about a day when he suddenly broke free of whatever Alzheimer’s was doing to him and decided to go for a swim. In the pool, he seemed himself again, flicking his head to get water out of his ear the way he’d always done. It was as if his true self decided, “I want to do this one more time.”