‘Remembering Gene Wilder,’ winner of the audience award at the Boston Jewish Film Festival, will have a theatrical run at The Coolidge starting April 12.

By James Verniere/Boston Movie News

More or less adapted from Gene Wilder’s lovely and funny 2005 memoir “Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art,” “Remembering Gene Wilder” is an affectionate and comprehensive look at one of the 20th-century screen’s most distinctive comic artists. Cherished for his performances in such films as “The Producers” (1967). “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory” (1971), “Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask” (1972), “Blazing Saddles” (1974), “Young Frankenstein” (1974), “Silver Streak” (1976), “Stir Crazy” (1980) and more, Wilder got his start on Broadway, where he thought he might be destined to play only supporting roles.

But the story really begins in Milwaukee, Wis., where Wilder was born Jerry Silberman and where a heart doctor told him not to argue with his mother because it might kill her. “Make her laugh,” was the mandate. Jerry liked doing accents and learned a couple of songs from a Danny Kaye album he owned.

Acting changed Jerry Silberman to Gene Wilder, who was perhaps miscast in a Broadway production of “Mother Courage” headed by Ann Bancroft. But this is how Gene met Bancroft’s boyfriend, Mel Brooks. He had a project titled “Springtime for Hitler” (later, “The Producers”), and he thought young Gene might be right for the second lead, opposite ursine dynamo Zero Mostel.

Wilder would be nominated for the best supporting actor Academy Award, his first, for the film. Perhaps inspired by the inmates of the asylum where he was stationed in the service, Wilder became famous for playing innocents who suddenly lose it in front of the camera and turn into eye-popping, frothing madmen. The characters he played seemed ordinary, if a bit funny-looking, on the surface. But beneath that surface was a swirling, super-heated mass just waiting to burst out, go wacky, and explode. Wilder’s not quite sane Willy Wonka remains the best screen interpretation of the Roald Dahl character, outshining more recent versions by Johnny Depp and Timothée Chalamet.

Director Ron Frank, who also served as the film’s editor, directed “When Comedy Went to School,” an entertaining 2013 look at the evolution of stand-up comedy among Jewish comics performing in the Catskill Mountains from the 1930s to the 1960s. Frank and Emmy-winning writer Glenn Kirschbaum (“Unsolved Mysteries”) combine archival footage featuring Wilder, his late wife Gilda Radner, and Richard Pryor with home movies, film clips and new interviews with such Wilder associates as the aforementioned Brooks, Alan Alda, Carol Kane, Eric McCormack, Rain Pryor and Harry Connick Jr.. (“Remembering Gene Wilder” won the audience award at the 2023 Boston Jewish Film Festival.)

We are reminded that Wilder conceived of a film titled “Young Frankenstein” (1974), a raucous and bawdy parody of James Whale’s classics “Frankenstein” (1931) and “The Bride of Frankenstein” (1935), costarring Marty Feldman, Madeleine Kahn, Teri Garr and Peter Boyle.

Directed by Brooks, who also has a screenplay credit for the film, “Young Frankenstein” is among the best comedies ever made and was nominated for two Academy Awards, including best adapted screenplay. We learn that bug-eyed British comic Feldman and screen heavy Boyle, who played the Whitey Bulger-like character in Peter Yates’ “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” (1973), were cast because they were also represented by Mike Medavoy, who was Wilder’s Los Angeles agent. Ah, fate.

At the end of shooting, Brooks found Wilder seated beside the faux fireplace on the “Young Frankenstein” set. What was the matter? “I don’t want to leave Transylvania,” Wilder lamented.

Lamentably, not much is said about “Start the Revolution Without Me” (1970), Wilder’s follow-up to “The Producers.” Directed by Bud Yorkin (“Inspector Clouseau”) and written by Fred Freeman and Lawrence J. Cohen (“S*P*Y*S”), “Start the Revolution Without Me” is a French Revolution-era, costume film parody, co-starring Wilder, Donald Sutherland, Hugh Griffith, Billie Whitelaw, Victor Spinetti and Ewa Aulin and one of the funniest movies ever made. Seek it out.

Cleverly, Frank and Kirschbaum arrange for Wilder to provide narration for “Remembering Gene Wilder” by culling it from the audiobook for “Kiss Me Like a Stranger.” In “The World’s Greatest Lover,” a 1977 film written and directed by Wilder, inspired by Federico Fellini’s “The White Sheik” (1952), Wilder co-stars with a young Carol Kane as a “neurotic baker from Milwaukee,” who becomes implausibly convinced that he can win a contest in Hollywood to find the next Rudolph Valentino. The film is both a cock-eyed celebration of Wilder’s unlikely rise to movie-star status and a parody of old Hollywood and such Wilder favorites as Charlie Chaplin. In Robert Aldrich’s “The Frisco Kid” (1979), Wilder teamed up with up-and-comer and “Star Wars” alum Harrison Ford (in a role intended for John Wayne) as a Polish rabbi stranded in the Old West who bonds with a bank robber (Ford).

Wilder’s marriage to Radner is covered with sensitivity and humor. The same is true of Wilder’s collaboration with masterful, pioneering stand-up comic and actor Pryor with whom Wilder made four films, starting with the smash hits “Silver Streak” (1976) and “Stir Crazy” (1980).

Wilder, a marvelous watercolor painter, turned to writing fiction in his final years. He survived cancer, only to be struck down by Alzheimer’s disease. Thankfully, he lived under the care of his wife, Karen Webb, in their comfortable Connecticut home, where they painted and took tap dancing lessons before his final illness. For film buffs, especially those with a fondness for Wilder and his work, “Remembering Gene Wilder” is a warm and welcome reunion with a dearly missed old friend.

‘Remembering Gene Wilder’

Rating: Not Rated, mature themes

Cast: Gene Wilder, Mel Brooks, Gilda Radner, Alan Alda, Harry Connick Jr.

Director: Ron Frank

Writer: Glenn Kirschbaum

Running Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

Where to watch: The Coolidge Corner Theater

Grade: B+