by Mel Brooks, 1968.
Starring Christopher Hewett, Kenneth Mars, Lee Meredith, Zero Mostel, Dick Shawn, Andréas Voutsinas, Gene Wilder.
Rating: 8/10, 9/10.
The first twenty-five or thirty minutes of The Producers takes place almost entirely within one room, and after the first five or six minutes are over, it’s all just Zero Mostel, as failing Broadway producer Max Bialystock, and Gene Wilder, as an accountant by the name of Leo Bloom. It’s a masterpiece of uninterrupted mania, the best I’ve ever seen outside of the likes of Fawlty Towers, and quite probably the best performance I’ve ever seen Wilder give. Bialystock screams at Bloom, Bloom goes into hysteria; Bialystock tries to calm him down, he gets more hysterical. Bialystock gets angry, Bloom goes crazier. I cannot express the comic beauty of this long opening scene, from right at the beginning with Bialystock trying to seduce "checkies" out of old women, to the end, when Bloom has made the discovery that will be the plot of the film.
That discovery, of course, is that with "creative accounting," one could make more money off of a Broadway flop than a success. Getting a flop should be easy; after all, Bialystock hasn’t had a successful production in years. Just to be sure, though, they comb through every play they can get their hands on to find the worst ever written—settling finally on something called "Springtime For Hitler"—and go out of their way to get the worst director they can, Roger de Bris (Hewett), whose musicals, they say, have closed on the first day of rehearsals. Of course, as everyone knows, the musical is produced and the public, taking it as an anti-Nazi comedy rather than what it is, a "love-letter" to the Third Reich, adores it—meaning certain imprisonment for the fraudulent Bialystock and Bloom.
The movie starts out full of energy, and that energy does not wear off until well into the movie, when we see scenes of the musical. After the opening number, which may possibly be the most brilliant bit of shocking comedy I have ever seen, the rest of the show just sort of loses momentum. But this isn’t very long, and as soon as we get away from that, all the energy and genius comes right back, right up until the end credits.
It’s not just the broad comedy that makes the film a true work of genius; there are so many small, almost inexplicably perfect touches that it’s impossible to even start to describe the feeling one is left with after watching it. My favorite of these, in fact, grew directly out of the broad comedy: once Bialystock has returned from fund-raising in "old lady land," he decides he needs to buy himself a "toy" to reward himself; the next day he comes in with a beautiful Swedish secretary, Ulla, who doesn’t speak much English, but does understand the sentence "Go to work"—though the way she understands it is perhaps a bit different from the way you or I do. After the musical fails to fail, though, Bialystock is in no mood for her sort of entertainment, and when he forgetfully tells her to "go to work" he doesn’t even bother to ask her to stop, but just goes into his office with Bloom and closes the door. Then, after the first of several altercations that occur in that office, when the door opens again, there is Ulla, hard at work. I suppose this sort of comedy doesn’t come across that well in words, but on screen it comes across beautifully. Similar subtle touches abound.
Of course, though, much of the film doesn’t concern itself too much with subtlety. Mostel as Bialystock is loud, vain, and manic, as well as visually stunning in his greasiness. Wilder’s Bloom is living a life of desperation, always close to breakdown, sometimes crossing the line onto the other side, as in the opening sequence. The supporting characters are all almost ridiculously broad parodies: Mars as Franz Liebkind, the helmet-wearing, violent but sensitive Nazi who wrote the play; Shawn as L.S.D., whom they cast as their Hitler, a ridiculous parody of a hippie (who, by the way, gets the second-best song of the film in his audition); and Hewett, as de Bris, and Voutsinas, as Carmen, de Bris’s...er...assistant, who make up a parody of homosexuality that would be spectacularly offensive if not for the equally ridiculous parody of heterosexuality we get in Bialystock’s relationships with women. In a film where a line of kick-dancing women dressed as Nazi stormtroopers form a rotating swastika, there is only so much subtlety one reasonably expects, and the fact that there is so much of both kinds of humor is amazing.
read roger ebert's essay about the producers