A fun movie with some visible holes in the plot

Rating: 8/10 (10 April 2008)

I understand that this movie was a hit, and I did enjoy it very much. Mostel and Wilder are truly great, and the idea behind the plot is superb.
There are, however, a few weak points. The biggest one is the mystery how Bialystock first have to court old ladies to barely earn a living, and then suddenly can swindle them of a fortune. There is no obvious reason. Why would he need to produce anything if the old ladies are naive enough to invest in a play that they haven't even seen the script for? If, on the other hand, they had started with a first-rate script, sold too many shares on THAT, and then do all they can to make a flop out of it, that would have been much more logical. Without the bad script, we would not have the mad writer (Kenneth Mars), but the plot would have been convincing. I have read at least one story based on The Producers that avoids those logical problems.
The other total lunatics, like deBris (Christopher Hewett) all make sense (and over-act as they should), and how deBris and the actors can fit together to make the result a hit is quite sensible.
A second weak point is Ulla (Lee Meredith) the blond bimbo. She is a cliché that adds nothing to the movie, she is not fun but only makes me sad. Of course her presence is a result of Bialystock's strange ideas of luxury, but just finding a complete idiot like her is too unlikely. She could possibly have been part of the play (as Eva Braun?), but as a pet secretary she is only offending.
There is one more weak point. The turning from flop to success, by actors performing a high school student level farce is not convincing. Rather, the grandiose opening was more likely to work as something so superbly overdone that it becomes a good satire. So when the play goes from grandiosely overdone musical to cheaply improvised amateur play, that is not the point where I expect the audience to start loving it. They could possibly start smiling at a bit of simplistic farce, and THEN get enthusiastic at how it fits with the music numbers, but not the other way around. Or is the audience that easy to please? But I take this problem as a problem with time; it would take too much time to show high-class humor with tension and perfect timing.
All in all, I think the actors (and most likely first-class direction of them) carry this movie. Mostel, Wilder, Hewett and most others (even most smaller roles) do terrific acts that add up to a very enjoyable movie and I can choose to ignore the logical errors.