History Of The World, Part I (1981)

History has its grand moments and its terrible ones, and Mel Brooks finds a punch line in nearly all of them. Mel Brooks' "History of the World, Part I," which he wrote, directed and stars in, is pure guilty pleasure. Narrated by Orson Welles and packed with famous faces in cameos, it's a series of sketches spanning human history. It opens strongly with Sid Caesar as a caveman in the Stone Age, where the first artist meets the first critic, then races through a brief visit with Moses (Brooks), who fumbles one of his stone tablets and cuts the number of commandments on the spot. Next comes a lengthy stop in ancient Rome, where Brooks plays Comicus, an out-of-work stand-up philosopher who bombs in front of the emperor Nero (Dom DeLuise) and flees with a slave (Gregory Hines, in his film debut), with a detour into Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, where Brooks turns up as a waiter. After a wild Spanish Inquisition musical number, it ends in the French Revolution, with Brooks as a lecherous King Louis XVI and a peasant lookalike sent to take his place. Madeline Kahn, Harvey Korman and Cloris Leachman co-star. It's a take-it-or-leave-it movie that works best if you're in a take-it-or-leave-it mood. It closes with a mock preview of a Part II that never came, though a TV series followed in 2023.