Don't be stoopid, be a smardy, come and join the Nazzy Pardy

Rating: 8/10 (9 November 2013)

Max Bialystock, a seedy Broadway producer, is persuaded by his dodgy accountant Leo Bloom, that he can make more money from a flop than from a hit. They come up with what they believe will be a sure money-making scheme. They take more money from investors than they can repay (overcapitalising the production to the tune of 25,000%) and then look around for a play certain to close on its first night, their logic being that the investors will not be looking for a return from a play known to be a failure. (A similar dishonest scheme was featured in an earlier film "New Faces of 1937"). They find an unpublished script by a half- mad German playwright, Franz Liebkind, who wants to show the world "the Hitler with a song in his heart", and persuade him to let them produce it. They hire the ultra-camp Roger De Bris, a director whose plays "close on the first day of rehearsal" and cast in the leading role a drug-addicted hippie who hardly seems to know his own name. (He goes by the name "LSD"). Of course, the show turns out to be an improbable and unexpected hit, which leaves Bialystock and Bloom with one problem; how do they find the money to repay all their investors?
Seen as a comedy about a dishonest producer and a crooked accountant, the film is no more than moderately amusing. Some of its scenes, notably the ones in which Bialystock is romancing the lecherous old ladies who constitute most of his investors, are frankly embarrassing, and those involving De Bris and his equally camp partner Carmen Ghia may seem a bit politically incorrect (although still funny) these days. The character of Ulla struck me as unnecessary, unless writer/director Mel Brooks assumed that a pretty girl who regularly takes her clothes off is something necessary for the success of any film. The ending seems rather weak; Brooks seemed to have difficulty finding the right endings for a number of his films. (The ending of the otherwise excellent "Blazing Saddles" is even more of a let-down than this one).
"The Producers", however, is much more than just a comedy about a dishonest producer and a crooked accountant. What makes it a cult classic is the nature of the play which Bialystock and Bloom put on, an all-singing, all-dancing musical comedy extravaganza about Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler, entitled "Springtime for Hitler". (Brooks wanted to use that as the title of the film itself, but was overruled by the studio). The crazed neo-Nazi Liebkind's script, as interpreted by de Bris, comes complete with a high-kicking chorus line of girls dressed as storm-troopers and unforgettable lines like "Don't be stoopid, be a smardy, come and join the Nazzy Pardy", voiced by Brooks himself in a broad New York accent. The first night audience in the theatre are initially repelled by what they see as bad taste but later decide that the play is in fact a brilliant satire which will run on Broadway for years.
Over the years critical opinion about "The Producers" has been just as divided. There have always been plenty of critics such as Pauline Kael ready to lambaste it as vulgar and tasteless. The very broad style of acting, deliberately exaggerated and non-naturalistic, may also not have been to everyone's taste. My initial reaction was to call it "theatrical", but in fact it bears only a passing resemblance to any style of acting I have ever seen in a theatre, even in a comedy. A closer comparison might be to a group of stand-up comics going through their routines. Zero Mostel who stars as Bialystock actually started his career as a nightclub comedian, although it must be said that Gene Wilder as Bloom is even more ever-the-top than Mostel. (Wilder started as a serious Method actor and this was his first venture into comedy, the genre in which he was later to specialise).
Other critics such as Roger Ebert, however, have defended the film, and I must say that I am in their camp. There is a serious purpose (as there often was) behind Brooks's apparent lapse into bad taste. Just as the racial humour in "Blazing Saddles" served to expose the racist assumptions which underlay Hollywood's Myth of the West, so the "Springtime for Hitler" scenes here are satirical black comedy, not mere tastelessness for its own sake. Brooks himself said of the film "If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with a dictator you never win.... But if you ridicule them, bring them down with laughter, they can't win. You show how crazy they are". It was essentially the same idea which Chaplin had when he made "The Great Dictator" or Orwell when he wrote "Animal Farm", lampooning Stalin as the biggest pig in the barnyard. Dictators can survive the polemics of their political enemies. They cannot survive ridicule, and the Nazis have never seemed more ridiculous than they do here.
My favourite story about the film is one told by Ebert. Shortly after "The Producers" was released Brooks and his wife Anne Bancroft were approached by a woman who said to him "I have to tell you, Mr. Brooks, that your movie is vulgar". Brooks's response was "Lady, it rose below vulgarity". That is just what "The Producers" does. It rises triumphantly below the level of vulgarity. But it does so with good reason. 8/10