High Anxiety is a 1977 American satirical comedy mystery film produced and directed by Mel Brooks, who also plays the lead.

Veteran Brooks ensemble members Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, and Harvey Korman are also featured.

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).

Montague takes Thorndyke to the light's source, the room of patient Arthur Brisbane, who thinks he is a Cocker Spaniel.

He checks into the Hyatt Regency San Francisco, where much to his chagrin, he is assigned a top-floor room, his reservation mysteriously changed by "Mr. MacGuffin".

She claims Diesel and Montague are exaggerating the illnesses of wealthy patients so they can milk rich families of millions (through methods demonstrated earlier).

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 one of the glass elevators at the time, so he should be in the photo.

Thorndyke and Victoria head back to Los Angeles where they rescue Brophy and see Montague and Diesel taking the real Arthur Brisbane to a tower to kill him.

Most of the story takes place at the fictional Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous, with exteriors filmed at Mount St. Mary's University in Los Angeles.

The website's critics consensus reads, "Uneven but hilarious when it hits, this spoof of Hitchcock movies is a minor classic in the Mel Brooks canon.

[8] After viewing the film himself, Alfred Hitchcock sent Brooks a case of six magnums of 1961 Château Haut-Brion wine with a note that read, "A small token of my pleasure, have no anxiety about this.

"[10] Vincent Canby of The New York Times agreed, writing that the film "is as witty and as disciplined as Young Frankenstein, though it has one built-in problem: Hitchcock himself is a very funny man.

He also wrote, however, that too much of the film "is piddled away with juvenile sex jokes" that "are simply beneath a comic mind as fertile as the one that belongs to Mel Brooks.

"[13] Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times called it "probably the most coherent of the Brooks movies since The Producers, in the sense of sustaining a tone and story line and characterizations from start to finish.

"[14] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote, "The film rarely rises above the level of tame, wayward homage ...

"[15] In addition to parodying Hitchcock films, High Anxiety became noteworthy for frequently mocking popular psychoanalysis theories at the time, with New Statesman journalist Ryan Gilbey stating that "viewers were familiar enough with the babble and buzzwords of psychoanalysis to respond instinctively to the film's wittiest sequence, when Brooks' speech at a psychiatric conference has to be spontaneously modified so as not to impinge upon the innocence of two young children who have joined the audience.