Twenty of Mel Brooks’ favorite films of the past century will be screening this fall in Los Angeles, as part of a film series the 100-year-old comedian and director programmed himself.
The American Cinematheque, Los Angeles’ year-round nonprofit film festival, worked with Brooks to put together his favorites list, which starts with Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, from 1931, and ends with Jojo Rabbit, Taika Waititi’s 2019 dark comedy about a Nazi-era German boy who has Adolf Hitler as his imaginary friend.
“For the first time, Brooks is publicly sharing his favorites, with the series offering unique insight into his knowledge and appreciation of film history spanning the last century,” the American Cinematheque said in its description of the series. The event was organized in honor of Brooks’ 100th birthday, which fell this 28 June.
The series does not include any of Brooks’ most famous films, such as The Producers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Spaceballs or Robin Hood: Men in Tights.
In fact, Brooks’ list of favorites, which ranges from major classics such as Double Indemnity and Psycho to big-budget musicals and niche comedies, includes only one of his own movies, The Twelve Chairs, which was perhaps his “biggest commercial flop”, and one he has continued to urge more people to watch.
The list also includes only two films made in the past 25 years: Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit and 2019’s Dolemite Is My Name, a biopic of the Black comedian and filmmaker Rudy Ray Moore, starring Eddie Murphy. Other than those two, the most recent film on the list is from 1994.
A representative for Brooks did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Chris LeMaire, the director of programming at the American Cinematheque, told the Los Angeles Times that Brooks’ choice of films evolved over several days, as the centenarian called his assistant with updates, and his assistant emailed the Cinamethque with new suggestions to add to the list. Brooks did not provide an explanation for his choices.
With the 20 films he ultimately chose, Brooks is “providing a little bit of a skeleton key into his own biography”, said Jeremy Dauber, a professor of Yiddish at Columbia University and one of the comedian’s biographers.
The list emphasizes many of Brooks’ “familial and personal relationships”, as well as his artistic influences, Dauber added, showing “the kind of real mensch that Brooks is at this point in his career”.
Brooks’ final selections, which is nearly all American films, includes formative works that debuted in his childhood and youth, Dauber said, from comedies by Chaplin and the Marx Brothers to examples of “the big movie musical”: Fred Astaire’s Top Hat (1935) and Broadway Melody of 1940, from that year.
Then there’s the thread of Brooks’ social consciousness, in the film version of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, as well as some of the films he spoofed, including Psycho, one of the inspiration for Brooks’ 1977 Hitchcock parody, High Anxiety.
A semi-autobiographical Federico Fellini film from 1953, I Vitelloni, adds a dash of Italian cinema to the mix.
Some of Brooks’ favorites are personal in the deepest way, such as The Miracle Worker, the 1962 film that won his wife, Anne Bancroft, an Academy award for best actress for her role as Annie Sullivan, Helen Keller’s teacher.
“She was his miracle worker,” said Sue Matheson, a film scholar at the University College of the North in Manitoba, Canada, who edited a collection of essays on Brooks’ work.
Brooks fell in love with Bancroft at first sight in 1961, during the taping of a television show in New York, and pursued her shamelessly, even though she was at the time “an unapproachable screen goddess” whose fame far eclipsed his own, Matheson said.
“His whole life changed when he met her,” Matheson added. “He said he would have stayed a TV comedy writer if he hadn’t been with her.”
Other films showcase Brooks’ other lifelong relationships, including with the comedian and director Carl Reiner and son, the late Hollywood director Rob Reiner, who directed two films on the list: the band tour mockumentary This is Spinal Tap, and When Harry Met Sally, the beloved romantic comedy.
Brooks’ favorites also includes The Elephant Man, the 1986 drama that Brooks produced, and that helped propel director David Lynch’s Hollywood career. Brooks was proud of the film, but kept his name off it, Matheson said, to avoid associating his comedic reputation with Lynch’s “serious art”.
Neither professor was surprised that the second film Brooks directed, The Twelve Chairs, a “really good ethnic comedy”, was the one that made his short list.
An adaptation of a Soviet novel about a wild chase to recover the family jewels hidden in a set of dining chairs, the film “didn’t get good reviews. It flopped at the box office. The audience wasn’t ready for it,” Matheson said. Shot in Yugoslavia, where Brooks quipped the crew had to make do with “one taxi and one lightbulb”, it was not an easy creative experience to make.
But Matheson called the 1970 film Brooks’ best film ever, “better than The Producers”.
Both the Twelve Chairs and Down and Out in Beverly Hills, a now-obscure 1986 comedy starring Bette Midler, Nick Nolte and Richard Dreyfuss, have been among the most challenging of the films to locate appropriate digital restorations to screen, LeMaire told the Los Angeles Times.
Programmed by Mel Brooks: 100 Years at the Movies will screen in Los Angeles from 3 September to 1 November 2026 at three historic cinemas: the Aero, the Egyptian and the Los Feliz Theater.
Programmed by Mel Brooks: 100 Years at the Movies
City Lights (1931)
Top Hat (1935)
A Night at the Opera (1935)
The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
Broadway Melody of 1940 (1940)
Double Indemnity (1944)
I Vitelloni (1953)
Shane (1953)
Psycho (1960)
The Miracle Worker (1962)
The Twelve Chairs (1970)
The Elephant Man (1980)
This Is Spinal Tap (1984)
Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986)
When Harry Met Sally… (1989)
Dances with Wolves (1990)
Schindler’s List (1993)
Ed Wood (1994)
Dolemite Is My Name (2019)
Jojo Rabbit (2019)
