There's something here to offend almost everyone

Rating: Null/10 (18 August 2002)

"The Producers" has something to offend almost everybody: Jews, Germans, Swedes, blondes, old women, young women, gays, hippies past and present, directors, accountants, Italians, tenors, the list goes on. The plot is by now well known: Broadway producer Max Bialystock (which is the name of a town in Poland with a Jewish community as venerable as any in Europe) has been cursed with a string of flops and is an impoverished has-been, reduced to romancing little old ladies who think the checks they write are going to finance plays when in fact they are going to pay his rent. He is visited one day by Leo Bloom, the quintessence of the stereotypical repressed, anal-retentive accountant. After an initial acquaintance that is---to say the least---difficult, Leo sits down to do Bialystock's books. He makes an innocent, casual remark about "creative accounting" ("under the correct circumstances, a person could make more money from a flop than from a hit"). Producing flops, of course, is what Max Bialystock has become best at, and he eventually talks Bloom into conspiring with him to find and produce the worst play ever written and to abscond with the vast amount of excess funds they have swindled out of hundreds of little old ladies. It goes without saying that despite their efforts to produce the worst script ("Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgarten") with the worst director and the worst actors, the show is a huge success. Now they have to pay off all the backers, something that will be a bit difficult as they have committed fraud and raised 250 times the money they really needed, and there wouldn't be enough profits in a million years to pay off the backers. "WHERE DID I GO RIGHT?!?" laments Bialystock. The script goes downhill from there, and the climax of the story is not really very satisfying; in fact, the anticlimax that ends the film is better than the climax. I guess you'd call it a happy ending.
By the mid-1960s, Mel Brooks had a reputation as a gifted comedy writer for television, and as a performer as well, mostly from the "2000-Year-Old-Man" recordings with Carl Reiner. But with "The Producers," he was taking a big chance. World War II and the Holocaust had been over for only about 20 years, and were still extremely painful memories. For someone to write a play in which Hitler becomes a comedic figure, even indirectly, was awfully presumptuous, especially for a Jew, but if you think about it, ONLY a Jew would have the chutzpah to do it. You can try to rationalize or justify the use of Hitler because, of course, Bialystock and Bloom explicitly label the play "Springtime for Hitler" as the worst play ever written, and Brooks makes its author, Franz Liebkind (Kenneth Mars), the broadest of caricatures. It just doesn't work: Hitler's crimes were so transcendentally monstrous that not even "The Producers" can distract from the horror of it all. Despite this, Act I, Scenes 1 and 2, in which Bialystock and Bloom meet, are 18 of the funniest minutes ever put on film. Although the rest of the movie never quite lives up to the beginning, much of it is intermittently hilarious, especially the scenes with Roger De Bris and the opening production number of "Springtime for Hitler". Any viewer of Mel Brooks's movies knows that realistic characterization is not his forte, and "The Producers" is no exception: Even inspired clowns Zero Mostel (Bialystock) and Gene Wilder (Bloom), despite their best efforts, barely manage to elevate their characters above caricature. (I wonder if Brooks was inspired by the comedy of Laurel and Hardy when he chose two actors who resemble them physically.) The rest of the characters are completely so. Probably the most irritating piece of casting was Dick Shawn as the hippie "L.S.D.": He is WAY too old to be a hippie (he was 44 when the film was shot) and he was the un-hippiest hippie in history. He looked like Liberace and played his character as a combination of Elvis Presley and a Borscht-belt comedian. Despite the fact that they DID play caricatures, Kenneth Mars as Liebkind and Christopher Hewitt (pre-Mr. Belvedere) as Roger De Bris, the worst (and swishiest) director in history, have left us with some unforgettable moments. There are also some nice, gentler touches when Brooks quietly acknowledges his cultural roots: Among the photographs that fill Bialystock's office can just barely be seen a famous portrait of Sholom Aleichem, who is considered by many the greatest author in the Yiddish language.
Mel Brooks the performer is one of the funniest men alive; Mel Brooks the filmmaker has made more bad films than good. "The Producers" was his first, and it hinted at Brooks's future as a maker of mostly unsuccessful movies with leaden humor, toilet jokes, and caricatures rather than characters. 'The Producers' will never quite be an unqualified success; still, the first 18 minutes reduces me to helpless laughter every time I see it.