This article is about a film. For other uses, see
High anxiety.
High Anxiety is a 1977 comedy film produced and directed by Mel Brooks, who is also the main actor. Veteran Brooks ensemble members Harvey Korman, Cloris Leachman and Madeline Kahn are also featured.
The film is a parody of suspense films, most obviously the films directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo in particular.
Synopsis
Brooks' character, Dr. Richard H. Thorndyke, arrives as new administrator of the Psychoneurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous to discover some suspicious happenings. When he's framed for murder, Dr. Thorndyke must confront his own anxiety disorder, "high anxiety," in order to prove his innocence.
Plot
The story begins at Los Angeles airport, where Thorndyke encounters several odd occurrences. He then leaves for the institute with his driver, Brophy. Upon his arrival, he is greeted by the staff, Dr. Montague, Dr. Wentworth and Nurse Diesel. When he goes to his room, a large rock is thrown through the window, with a message of welcome from the Violent Ward.
Thorndyke then hears strange noises coming from Nurse Diesel's room and when he and Brophy go to investigate, Diesel claims it was the TV. However, it was a passionate session of BDSM with Dr. Montague. The next morning, he is alerted by a light shining through his window. It is coming from the violent ward. When he goes to investigate, it is Arthur Brisbane, a millionaire who now thinks he is a cocker spaniel.
Later, Nurse Diesel is talking with Dr. Wentworth. He wants to leave, but she won't let him. However, after some arguing, she says she'll let him go. When Wentworth is driving home that night, his radio blasts rock music loudly and will not shut off. He is trapped in his car, and he dies from an ear hemorrhage.
After this, Thorndyke goes to the grand hotel - the broad-atriumed, vertigo-inducing Hyatt Regency San Francisco, where much to his dismay he is relegated to a room on the top floor, due to a reservation mix-up. He pesters the bellboy with repeated requests about getting a newspaper, wanting to look in the obituary for information concerning Dr. Wentworth's demise. He then takes a shower, during which the bellboy comes and in a frenzy mimics stabbing Thorndyke with the paper while screaming "Here's your paper! Happy now?! Happy?" The paper's ink runs down the drain, a reference to Psycho.
After his shower, a woman bursts through the door; she is Victoria Brisbane, the daughter of Arthur Brisbane. She wants help regarding her father. He agrees to the terms, but then finds out Nurse Diesel's plot. The patient is not the real Arthur Brisbane.
To stop Thorndyke, Diesel and Montague hire a killer, "Braces", to impersonate Thorndyke and shoot a man in the lobby. Now with the police after him, he must prove his innocence. He contacts Brophy, and realizes Brophy took a picture of the shooting. The real Thorndyke was in the elevator at the time, so he should be in the picture.
He orders Brophy to enlarge the picture. When he goes to call, "Braces" tries to strangle him; however, Thorndyke is able to kill him. Brophy enlarges the photo, and Thorndyke is indeed visible in the picture. Nurse Diesel and Montague capture Brophy and take him to the North Wing. They also take the real Arthur Brisbane to a tower to kill him.
As Thorndyke runs up the tower to save him, he kills Nurse Diesel and saves Brisbane.
Characters
- Dr. Richard H Thorndyke (Mel Brooks): The new head administrator of the Psychoneurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous. He suffers from high anxiety and is trying to find out more about the shady dealings going on inside the Institute.
- Victoria Brisbane (Madeline Kahn): Victoria is the concerned daughter of Arthur Brisbane, an industrialist who was entered into the Institute months ago for a nervous breakdown. She starts a relationship with Dr. Thorndyke at the end. She is often referred to as "The Cocker's Daughter".
- Brophy (Ron Carey): Brophy is Dr. Thorndyke's sidekick. He works as his chauffeur and is a bit of shutterbug. He also has trouble lifting very large objects.
- Nurse Diesel (Cloris Leachman): Nurse Diesel is the controlling and domineering nurse of the Institute, but is quite a psychopath herself. She is in a BDSM relationship with Dr. Montague, and is the puppet master behind the scenes.
- Dr. Montague (Harvey Korman): Charles Montague was set to take over the Institute before Dr. Thorndyke arrived, and has trouble hiding his jealousy. He is in a BDSM relationship with Nurse Diesel, who treats him like a dog.
- Professor Lilloman (Howard Morris): Often called Professor "Little Old Man", Lilloman was Dr. Thorndyke's teacher from school and currently works as a consultant at the Institute. He has the unfortunate tendency to appear dead while asleep, a quirk that "scares the hell out of everyone." He is helping Dr. Thorndyke with his high anxiety.
- Arthur Brisbane (Albert Whitlock): A very rich industrialist and Victoria's father. He was entered into the Institute nearly a year ago, yet Nurse Diesel and Dr. Montague have been keeping him there because of how much money Victoria is paying them. Currently, they replaced him with a man who thinks that he's a dog. Because he was replaced by a man who thought he was a dog, other characters have called his daughter Victoria "The Cocker's Daughter".
- Braces (Rudy De Luca): The man with the braces was hired to frame Thorndyke and later to kill him. He killed Dr. Ashley and Dr. Wentworth. He has a great love of killing and lets people know it.
- Dr. Wentworth (Dick Van Patten): Wentworth knew about what was happening at the Institute, and this weighed down on his conscience so much he left, but Nursel Diesel worried that he might talk to police, so she had Braces kill him. Braces rigged his car radio to play a very loud and annoying song that wouldn't shut off, and the strain it caused on Dr. Wentworth's body trying to make it stop caused a cerebral hemorrhage.
- Dennis (Barry Levinson): A rather aggressive bellhop who was constantly reminded to get Dr. Thorndyke his newspaper to the point of him attacking the doctor in the shower with the aforementioned paper.
- Dr. Ashley: Dr. Thorndyke's predecessor at the Institute was killed before he had a chance to make some "big changes". He is referenced throughout the film but is never actually seen, having died of a heart failure - caused somehow by Braces - before the beginning of the film.
Referenced films
These films are spoofed or parodied in the movie:
Hitchcock films
- Spellbound — Hitchcock's film about an insane asylum, the basic source of the plot. The joke in which the main characters find Professor Lilloman apparently dead in a chair, only to have him awake, is a take on a similar situation in Spellbound.
- Vertigo — same San Francisco Bay setting at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge, same bell tower location, similar movie poster graphics, and gives the main character his condition, Victoria Brisbane wears a gray suit similar to the one Madeleine Elster, Kim Novak's character in the film, wears.
- Psycho — shot-by-shot parody of the famous shower scene; the closing shot - a zoom out from a hotel room - is a reverse of Psycho's opening shot; also the suspenseful soundtrack is similar. The bellhop's screams of "Here! Here! Here!" mimic the screeching violins of Hitchcock's shower-murder scene.
- The Birds — also partially set in San Francisco, the jungle-gym scene is parodied.
- North by Northwest — main character's name is a satire of Roger O. Thornhill, but unlike Thorndyke (whose middle name is Harpo), Thornhill states he has no middle name; at one point Thorndyke tells Victoria to meet him in the North by Northwest corner of a park. The murder in the hotel lobby, where the killer places the murder weapon in Thorndyke's hand, is similar to the murder at the UN where Thornhill is framed. The nighttime scene in which Wentworth is driving away from the institute is also a parody of Thornhill's drunk-drive in North by Northwest.
- The Man Who Knew Too Much.
- Torn Curtain — The Professor Lilloman is similar to Professor Gustav Lindt, the German scientist.
- The Ring — In fighting for his high anxiety under hypnosis Thorndyke and Lilloman engage in a boxing fight.
- The Thirty-Nine Steps — When Victoria comes in the hotel room, she asks to move from the door and window, and close the drapes; She then kisses him when someone comes in, similar to the train situation.
- Suspicion — Prior to Wentworth's death the lattice work of the window throws a shadow like a spider's web behind him.
- Notorious.
- Under Capricorn.
- Dial M for Murder — the struggle in the phone booth is similar to the struggle Grace Kelly has in "Dial M": She is nearly strangled and all the opposite end can hear are the fighting noises. Also, the character causing the struggle gets stabbed in both cases through the back (or in the back). The pictures on the wall of Professor Lilloman's office are another allusion.
- The Wrong Man.
- Frenzy — Thorndyke hides in the park and calls from the payphone.
- Family Plot — Car sabotage by radio being played too loud.
- Rebecca — Stern countenanced Nurse Diesel in long black dress is reminiscent of Rebecca's Mrs. Danvers.
- The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog — A scene with Nurse Diesel and Montague where the camera is below a glass table, and they keep putting tea items down on the table in the camera's way parodies the glass floor/ceiling technique Hitchcock used to show Novello's "Lodger" pacing back and forth.
This film's plot device of a wrongly accused man was one that Hitchcock used throughout his career, in such films as The Thirty-Nine Steps, Saboteur, To Catch a Thief, North by Northwest, Frenzy, The Wrong Man, Dial M for Murder (wrongly accused woman) and Spellbound.
Montague uses the alias of "Mr. McGuffin" to switch Thorndyke's room at the hotel from the 2nd to the 17th. A MacGuffin is a plot device that advances the story but has little other significance. The term was popularized by Hitchcock.
Other films
Miscellany
- Three of the film's writers appear in comical supporting roles: Ron Clark as the deranged patient Zachary Cartwright, Rudy De Luca as the killer "Braces," and Rain Man-director Barry Levinson as the tightly-wound bellhop, "Dennis."
- This movie was dedicated to Alfred Hitchcock, who loved this film enormously and went as far as to send Brooks a bottle of wine.
- In The Birds scene, spinach dip was flung at Mel Brooks, as the pigeons could not be made to defecate on command.
- The character Brophy is played by Ron Carey as an impression of character actor Edward Brophy, who specialized in playing comic sidekicks.
- One of Brooks' comic schticks was an impression of Frank Sinatra, whom he employed to sing the film's theme song.
- One scene is set in the Hyatt Regency Hotel in San Francisco, in the uniquely configured 22-story-high triangular atrium of the hotel.
- This is Brooks' first film as a producer and first "speaking" lead role (his first lead role was in Silent Movie).
External links
