Blazing Saddles (1974)
This was almost the first Pryor/Wilder pairing, but it didn't pan out. Mel Brooks had wanted Richard Pryor for the lead role of Bart, but couldn't get funding for the film because Pryor's stand-up (not to mention his wild reputation) was just too much for Warner Brothers. In his routine, he talks about a lot of topics that are less than mainstream friendly; particularly his own cocaine use and a whole lot of racial humor that probably made most producers a little nervous. The role went to Cleavon Little and Pryor was brought on as a writer; he and Wilder didn't even end up meeting on the set. Interestingly, Wilder wasn't the first choice for the Waco Kid. Gig Young was cast in the role and had a breakdown during the first day of shooting. Wilder flew in the next day to take over.

It's hard to fault Warner Brothers for being cautious with Pryor. He had only recently emerged from a two-year self-imposed exile in Berkeley, where he reinvented himself as the foul-mouthed comic genius we all know and love--before that he was, by all accounts, a Bill Cosby knock-off. He was still gaining credibility as a writer and stand-up comedian, and had yet to establish any box office draw. More of less an unknown. Wilder, on the other hand, was arguably at the peak of his pre-Pryor career. He already had The Producers, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex under his belt--all made within the previous six years--and two of his movies would be among the top five money-makers for 1974 (Young Frankenstein at number five and Blazing Saddles at number one, ahead of The Godfather Part II). In addition, Wilder had received a pair of Oscar nominations-- Best Actor in a Supporting Role for The Producers in 1969, and Best Adapted Screenplay with Mel Brooks for Young Frankenstein in 1975. If ever Gene Wilder could be called the Golden Boy of Hollywood, it would be now.

Cleavon Little is both understated and great as Bart, serving almost as the straight man, if such a thing is imaginable in a Mel Brooks movie. It's possible that Richard Pryor would have been too much for the role, and it's hard to argue with the results--$119 million was nothing to sneeze at in 1974. Still, it's fun to think about what type of movie this would have turned out as with the Pryor/Wilder combination. It would also have marked the only time that Pryor was the lead and Wilder the sidekick.

Silver Streak (1976)
The film tries to walk the fine line between comedy and action movie and does a decent job. Wilder plays the role of George Caldwell (a role that in all likelihood would have gone to Bruce Willis, had it been made twelve years later). In quick succession Wilder gets laid, falls in love, stumbles onto a murder, gets thrown from the train, gets back on the train, gets framed for another murder, and gets thrown from the train again. That gets us to about the halfway mark where Richard Pryor shows up, playing a foul-mouthed thief. Racial jokes and situations abound. The N-word is dropped both at and by Pryor a handful of times--never in relation to Gene Wilder, but rather usually directed at/by the villains.

The Pryor/Wilder dynamic here is a bit different. Race never really comes up between them, which is interesting since so much of Pryor's stand-up and movie persona revolves around the idea of race--like his famous Saturday Night Live appearance where he and Chevy Chase word-associate racial slurs back and forth. It was, after all, what he had become known for. The only scene in the movie that even addresses their ethnic differences is when Richard Pryor dresses up Gene Wilder as a black man in a public bathroom in order to get him on a train, a scene Pryor requested to be changed so as not to offend the audience. Originally it was a white man walking in, seeing Wilder and reacting along the lines of "oh, those crazy black folk." Pryor had the scene changed to a black man coming in, recognizing Wilder as a white man pretending to be black and saying, "You must be in a lot of trouble." The request is particularly noteworthy since Pryor was never known for his idealism while picking movies. Take for example, The Toy--in which Pryor is hired as the title toy for a spoiled, friendless, rich white kid--a movie that, quality aside, sends a very mixed message about race and equality and merits an essay of its own. It's worth mentioning that Pryor made the request only after a fair amount of coaxing from Wilder, who convinced him the request would be heeded.

In Silver Streak, there are gunfights and trains crashing through stations, a fair amount of Wilder-brand romance, and even a cameo by Fred Willard; but the obvious highlights of the film are when Pryor and Wilder share the screen. Wilder has talked of their collective preference for improvising in front of the camera when together, and the looseness of their scenes feel like an entirely different movie. The film is a critical and commercial hit. Producers take notice. A franchise is born.

Stir Crazy (1980)
This is much more of a comedy than Silver Streak, but with less of a plot. Here Pryor is an out-of-work actor, and Wilder an out-of-work playwright. Together they leave New York for Hollywood with hopes for a better life full of beautiful women, but their van breaks down somewhere in the "Sunshine Belt". The two are very quickly framed for armed robbery after their woodpecker costumes are stolen from the locker room--don't ask, just watch the movie. The whole bank-robbing sequence was clearly meant to be hilarious; however, like much of the movie, it ends up bordering on the bizarre. The duo gets railroaded into jail and Wilder is quickly found to have a natural aptitude for bull-riding and various other rodeo work despite being from New York City, and is made the main rider in the upcoming prison rodeo, much to the chagrin of the hard-ass prison guard (played by Craig T. Nelson of TV's "Coach"). Pryor helps out as a foul-mouthed rodeo clown.

The two stage a jailbreak and make some friends along the way. Somehow, Wilder still finds time to woo the district attorney's babe of a sister and convince her to ride off into the sunset with him and Pryor. If it sounds a little confusing and thrown-together, that's because it is. The plot is just an excuse for the two men to be onscreen together and do their thing. The audiences didn't seem to mind--the movie is a huge hit, grossing over 100 million dollars. Stir Crazy was the number four movie of 1980, behind The Empire Strikes Back, Superman II, and 9 to 5. The Pryor and Wilder are at their peak as a comedy duo.

See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989)
After a long hiatus*, Pryor and Wilder are back at it. Although the plot gets thinner, the duo gets funnier. Pryor is blind, Wilder is deaf and they get framed (once again) for the murder of Pryor's bookie. There's so much ridiculousness involving the bookie's murder that it's not really worth mentioning. What is of note is Kevin Spacey (this movie's surprise star) as a British hit man, and a great scene where Pryor has to drive a car... even though he's blind! In fact, the movie is full of really genuinely hilarious scenes playing off both of the main characters' disabilities, but the movie as a whole amounts to little more than one long gag. The pair can probably be forgiven for agreeing to such a weak premise, since they each had plenty going on in their personal lives--Pryor had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis three years earlier and the early stages of the disease are not only clearly present, but also slightly heartbreaking when considering what he used to be like onscreen; Wilder's wife, Gilda Radner, was suffering with ovarian cancer and died eight days after the film opened. Still, See No Evil, Hear No Evil gave the two plenty of opportunities to play off one and other and get the ol' Pryor-Wilder chemistry going again. The movie was a minor hit, but not on the same level as Stir Crazy. It grossed around $47 million, which was respectable for 1989 but not great. Perhaps related or not, this is the one movie where Wilder doesn't get the girl, but only because she's a murderer. However, he does see her naked and kisses her, so he gets half a point for that.

Another You (1991)
This is by far the worst and least funny of the four. The original director was Peter Bogdanovich, but he was replaced halfway through--everything he shot was scrapped and the script was rewritten. The plot is a huge headache, and doesn't even show up until forty-five minutes into the movie. Wilder is a pathological liar set up to believe that he is the heir to a brewery fortune by the unscrupulous business manager of said brewery. Pryor is a foul-mouthed conman, though we never really see him doing much in the way of conning anyone--except he pretends to be able to play the saxophone a couple of times. The police don't get involved until the end--and then only to get the bad guy--but Wilder is again the victim of a rather large misunderstanding, which is more or less what happens in all the movies. As per usual, Wilder is the main character while Pryor supplies as much comic relief as he can, since the MS is more advanced at this point.

The movie stinks of exploitation, and it's difficult to watch these two actors come back together in what amounts to a B-movie--it was a big flop, grossing just under three million dollars. The two had collectively starred in only three movies since See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and the motivation could have been anything from wanting to get back in the spotlight to just wanting to work together one more time. Supporting the latter theory, in my opinion, is that this was the last movie either one starred in: Wilder has done a little TV work since then and Pryor has had very minor roles in Mad Dog Time and Lost Highway.

In Another You, both actors can be somewhat painful to watch, particularly when Wilder is caught up in one of his outrageous lies. It's obvious no one is directing him, and he seems lost at sea. Pryor has no idea how to react to him, but manages to get a few laughs with the well-placed curse. The chemistry the two enjoyed through the eighties seems to be all but gone, with only faint glimpses here and there--not that the script was really set up to give them any opportunities to connect. In a slight twist, they both wind up with a girl in the end (Pryor with Vanessa Williams, who is this movie's future celebrity). The last shot is of Wilder and Pryor standing on a beach, holding a sign that reads "Partners Forever". It's probably the one memorable moment in the entire movie and one that speaks of the two actors' affection for one and other, despite its overt corniness. Even with it, the movie would have been better off not being made.

The biggest reason for watching any of these movies is the strange kind of chemistry that Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor have. If not the first interracial movie comedy duo, they are definitely the most famous, and what an odd pair. Given the differences in persona that each actor has--Pryor as a from-the-streets, drug-abusing, race-issues-orientated comic, and Wilder as an almost suspiciously idealistic/innocent/naïve man-child, i.e.: Willy Wonka, Leo Bloom in The Producers, and his characters in any of the Pryor-Wilder films--it makes some kind of sense in that "let's put them together on screen and see what happens" kind of way. And only in Hollywood would that logic exist when the polarizing subject isn't slovenliness (like it was in The Odd Couple) but race, which is as uneasy a topic in America as ever there was. This makes these movies even more amazing considering that not only are the two actors never at odds over the issue of race, but also that the plots never revolve around race specifically--though there are frequent scenes about it. In spite of this, the audience is always acutely aware of the idea of race when Pryor is on screen simply because of who he is. The presence of Wilder both heightens and diffuses this tension in a way that can only happen in a movie. We're pretty sure that people like Wilder's characters couldn't exist in the real world, but we want to believe that they can. If anything makes these movies special and unique, it is that.

*The film Hanky Panky (1982), the first of three to star Wilder and his then-wife Radner, was written for Pryor and Wilder. Pryor was "unavailable." The most interesting/scandalous explanation is that this was the period of time Pryor was in Africa, following his long recovery from a suicide attempt where he lit himself on fire while freebasing cocaine. Just as plausible explanation is that Pryor was busy filming The Toy, which came out in December 1982; Hanky Panky had a June release date. The reality is probably a combination of the two. Either way, the script was made into a romance and rewritten for Radner. True to form, the plot revolves around Wilder being framed for murder. It was a bomb at the box office, grossing in the neighborhood of nine million, and more or less put an end to Wilder's solo box office draw.