I love Zero Mostel

Rating: 7/10 (6 April 2012)

Before it was a Broadway musical and before it was a movie based on that Broadway musical, The Producers was one of the boldest films of its era and remains damn funny after all these years. With a plethora of tremendously hilarious performances and one of the most jaw-droppingly mischievous premises you'll ever see, this film would have been the highlight of any other writer/director's career. Of course, Mel Brooks went on to do Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, proving that there must be a God because only He could make someone that smart and talented.
Not that Brooks did it all on his own. I mean, just take that opening scene between fallen-from-grace theater producer Max Bialystock and timid accountant Leo Bloom. It is astonishingly long, covers an unbelievable amount of dramatic ground and is stuffed with enough gags and shtick to choke elephant. No matter how great a director you might be, you can't pull off a scene like that with just any old actors. As wonderful as Gene Wilder is at soaring between the almost bi-polar extremes of Bloom, you can maybe imagine another guy in that role. If Peter Sellers had taken it, Leo would have certainly been different but potentially just as funny. But the number of men who could have pulled off the character of Bialystock besides Zero Mostel can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand after you've had a terrible accident with an industrial slicer. That Mostel is sporting one of the most catastrophic combovers in human history, yet reduces that by force of personality to just a little detail of the humanistic grandeur that is Max Bialystock, gets more amazing the more I think about it. That hairdo is all you'd remember with most actors. With Mostel, it just seemed normal.
Since its revival on stage and then return to the silver screen, most folks have probably got a handle on the plot but you shouldn't overlook how well constructed is The Producers. With a lot of comedies, the plot is an excuse for humor that's ignored as much as it's followed. The way Brooks carefully builds this story, with one scene leading to the next and to the next, gives away the secret of his genius. Brooks is known for his broad and standard-changing subversive humor, but that's only the surface. Brooks is so good because he works so hard at getting the underlying dynamic right. The sequence where Bialystock is squiring Bloom about town, slowly seducing him into the life of a huckster and fraud, is so incredible because where the characters are and what they're doing is both rooted in and reflecting their individual natures. When Bloom gives in to temptation and goes running around that fountain, it's not just a great visual. It represents Bloom breaking through the boundaries of his old life and surging into something new. You don't even notice after that how the character isn't nearly as neurotic or brittle, because it makes perfect sense and feels absolutely right.
And I'm not sure any other comedy has ever has three brilliantly over-the-top supporting performances like Dick Shawn, Kenneth Mars and Christopher Hewett. Even after so many decades and the roles being unmoored from their cultural milieu, you still can't help but laugh at them. You don't have to know anything about hippies or post-war Nazis or New York theater folk to enjoy such enthusiastic oddity.
I will say, The Producers is one of those movies that makes you wish you had a time machine. As fantastic as it still is, think what it was like to be one of those people in 1968 who had never encountered something like "Springtime for Hitler" before? There's no way the film can have that same bite in the early 21st century, but it remains a spectacular bit of work.