Amazon.com Essentials:
Mel Brooks's directorial debut remains both a career high point and a
classic show business farce. Hinging on a crafty plot premise, which in
turn unleashes a joyously insane onstage spoof, The Producers is
powered by a clutch of over-the-top performances, capped by the odd
couple pairing of the late Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, making his
screen debut.
Mostel is Max Bialystock, a gone-to-seed Broadway producer who spends
his days wheedling checks from his "investors," elderly women for whom
Bialystock is only too willing to provide company. When wide-eyed
auditor Leo Bloom (Wilder) comes to check the books, he unwittingly
inspires the wild-eyed Max to hatch a sure-fire plan: sell 25,000 percent of his
next show, produce a deliberate flop, then abscond with the proceeds.
Unfortunately for the producers (but fortunately for us), their
candidate for failure is Springtime for Hitler, a Brooksian
conceit that envisions what Goebbels might have accomplished with a
little help from Busby Berkeley.
Truly startling during its original 1968 release, The Producers
does show signs of age in some peripheral scenes that make merry at the
expense of gays and women. But the show's nifty cast (notably including
the late Dick Shawn as LSD, the space cadet that snags the musical's
title role, and Kenneth Mars as the helmeted playwright) clicks
throughout, and the sight of Mostel fleecing his marks is irresistibly
funny. Add Wilder's literally hysterical Bloom, and it's easy to
understand the film's exalted status among late-'60s comedies. --Sam
Sutherland
