A bittersweet comedy

Rating: 10/10 (14 August 2011)

The Producers is the most bittersweet of comedies.
The year is 1968, 23 years after the end of World War II. The scene is New York City, where countless Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and Europe, survivors of Nazi concentration camps like Auschwitz, and relatives who have lost family to the Holocaust, live. The horrors of the Holocaust can never be forgotten by those whom it touched in any way, but for those who stared evil in the face and lived, survival eventually becomes a celebration of life.
By turning the Nazi Holocaust into a joke, Mel Brooks, Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder, all Jewish, of course, are thumbing their nose at Hitler, saying, We're alive, and you're not! Such black humor has a long tradition in Judaism, a way to maintain sanity in a hateful, irrational world. And it has precedent in the 1942 Ernst Lubitsch film To Be Or Not To Be, starring Jack Benny.
The element of celebration of life gradually comes out in The Producers as Zero teaches Wilder to relax, be happy and live a little, such as the scene in Central Park in the boat. Wilder says as much in his statement to the jury during sentencing. The little old ladies are hardly complaining, either.
Yet if you think too hard about the story line, and really understand the history behind this, it can bring tears to your eyes. How can the sadistic, evil murders of more than 6 million Jews, and millions of others, at the hands of brutal Nazi monsters not?
But Mel Brooks is saying, It's finally time to let go. He is also making an outrageously funny movie. Brooks appears briefly in the film as one of the dancers, with the line: "Don't be stupid, be a smarty, come and join the Nazi Party!" It reduces Nazism down to its most banal essence.
This was Mel Brooks' first film, seemingly coming out of nowhere. But he had been one of Sid Caesar's main writers in the early days of live television, so he knew what worked in comedy.
If you look at a list of comedies from 1968, Funny Girl, I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, Inspector Clouseau, The Odd Couple, The Party, not to mention Disney's Blackbeard's Ghost, it becomes more apparent how radical The Producers was for its time.
Hello, Dolly! was to come out the next year, and fall flat. The Producers was something of a flop, itself, but at a cost of less than $1 million to produce, not too great a disaster. The studio didn't even bother to release it in the American South, given its ethnic humor and the Baptist lack of humor, so much of the country didn't even hear of the movie until decades later, with its re-release on video, and with the remake and Broadway musical.
In the interim, when I would occasionally try to explain the movie's premise, and how funny the song and dance number, Springtime for Hitler, was, people would give me a look of pity like I had lost my mind. I gather there are still some people who don't get the joke.
To appreciate The Producers, you've got to watch it, and watch closely; listening is not enough. So much of the humor is in the expressions, of Zero especially, the absurd situations, and the details, like the tacky costumes in Springtime for Hitler. By today's standards, I suppose The Producers might seem tame to younger viewers used to shock jocks. Yet The Producers somehow accomplishes the rare feat of being funny the second time you watch it, and the third and fourth and ....
Thinking about the family I never met that died at the hands of the Nazis, of the people I've known that survived the concentration camps, of the infinite suffering multiplied by millions, always brings tears to my eyes.
But The Producers brings a smile to my face just thinking about it. And for a movie about the Nazi Third Reich, that is a remarkable feat. For that, I say thank you, Mel Brooks!