High Anxiety is a 1977 American satirical comedy film produced and directed by Mel Brooks, who also plays the lead. This is Brooks' first film as a producer and first speaking lead role (his first lead role was in Silent Movie). Veteran Brooks ensemble members Harvey Korman, Cloris Leachman, and Madeline Kahn are also featured. It is a parody of Freudian therapy and Alfred Hitchcock films.
Plot
Arriving at LAX, Dr. Richard Thorndyke has several odd encounters (such as a flasher impersonating a police officer, and a passing bus with a full orchestra playing). He is taken by his camera-happy driver, Brophy, to the Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous, where he has been hired to replace Dr. Ashley, who died mysteriously (Brophy suspects foul play). Upon his arrival, Thorndyke is greeted by the staff, Dr. Philip Wentworth, Dr. Charles Montague, and Nurse Charlotte Diesel. Thorndyke also reunites with Professor Vicktor Lillolman, a past mentor now employed by the institute.
Later, Thorndyke hears strange noises coming from Diesel's room and he and Brophy go to investigate. Diesel claims it was the TV, but it was actually a passionate session of BDSM with Montague. The next morning, Thorndyke is alerted by a light shining through his window, coming from the violent ward. Montague takes Thorndyke to the light's source, the room of patient Arthur Brisbane, who thinks he is a Cocker Spaniel.
Wentworth wants to leave the institute, arguing with Diesel. After she lets him go, he drives home, but the radio is rigged to blast deafening rock music. He is trapped in his car, his ears hemorrhage, and he dies from a stroke, aggravated by the loud music.
Thorndyke and Brophy travel to San Francisco, where Thorndyke is to speak at a psychiatric convention. He checks into the Hyatt Regency San Francisco, where, much to his chagrin as a sufferer of "high anxiety", he is assigned a top floor room, mysteriously changed reservation by "Mr. MacGuffin". Thorndyke pesters the bellboy with repeated requests for a newspaper, wanting to look in the obituaries for information about Wentworth's demise. He then takes a shower, during which the bellboy enters 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.
After his shower, Victoria Brisbane, the daughter of Arthur Brisbane, bursts through the door, wanting help removing her father from the institute. She claims Diesel and Montague are exaggerating the illnesses of wealthy patients so they can milk rich families of millions (through methods demonstrated earlier). Discovering the patient he met was not the real Arthur Brisbane, Thorndyke realizes that Dr. Ashley found out what Diesel and Montague were doing and was killed before he had a chance to fire them; he agrees to help.
To stop Thorndyke, Diesel and Montague hire "Braces", the silver-toothed man behind the Ashley and Wentworth murders, to impersonate him and shoot a man in the lobby. Thorndyke must prove his innocence to the police. After he is attacked by pigeons in gastrointestinal distress, he meets up with Victoria and realizes Brophy took a picture of the shooting, in which the real Thorndyke was in the elevator at the time, so he should be in the photo.
Acting on Thorndyke's behalf, Victoria contacts Brophy to have him enlarge the photograph. Thorndyke is indeed visible in it, but Diesel and Montague capture Brophy and take him to the North Wing. Meanwhile, "Braces" finds Thorndyke at a phone booth calling Victoria, and tries to strangle him; however, Thorndyke kills him with a shard of glass from the booth's broken window. Thorndyke and Victoria head back to LA where they rescue Brophy and see Montague and Diesel taking the real Arthur Brisbane to a tower to kill him.
Thorndyke's high anxiety prevents him from climbing the tower's steep stairs to help Brisbane, but with Lillolman's help, he overcomes his phobia. Thorndyke knocks Norton the orderly out a tower window, saving Brisbane. Diesel leaps out from the shadows and attacks Thorndyke with a broom, but falls out the tower window, laughing hysterically and riding the broom to her death on the rocky coast below. Montague appears from the shadows and gives up before being accidentally knocked unconscious by a trapdoor being opened. Victoria is reunited with her father, marries Thorndyke, and they embark on their honeymoon.