The Producers (Crossbow Productions, Springtime Productions, U-M Productions, Avco Embassy Pictures, 1968)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday at 5 p.m. I put on Turner Classic Movies for a double bill of two of the movies Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder made together, The Producers and Blazing Saddles, and I turned on The Producers in the middle of the movie’s most confusing and least amusing scene, in which down-on-his-luck Broadway producer Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel in a role Mel Brooks should have played himself, but he had so much trouble getting this film green-lighted at all it would probably have never been made if he’d insisted on playing the lead) is wooing a woman dressed in blue who wants Max to enact the silliest and most hackneyed sexual fantasies with her Mel Brooks could dream up at his writing table. The woman he has to do this with is simply called “Hold Me Touch Me” in the cast list and is played by Estelle Winwood. Fortunately things get better – or at least more watchable – when Gene Wilder enters the picture as Leo Bloom, an accountant who’s there to audit the books of Max’s production. Leo realizes that Max collected $60,000 from his backers but only spent $58,000 to produce the show – but Max thunders, “But it was a flop! Nobody cared!” Then Leo hits on the idea that if they stage a deliberately bad play, sell 25,000 percent of it to various backers, put it on Broadway and bomb, they can abscond to Rio de Janeiro (which they celebrate with a duo dance to the song “Flying Down to Rio” that looks like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers … in a really bad nightmare) with 24,000 percent of their backers’ money. Only, of course, the show actually becomes a smash hit and the intrepid plotters find themselves staring at big-time prison sentences for fraud.

The plot premise of The Producers was actually an urban legend on Broadway for decades before Mel Brooks filmed it; in 1935 Groucho Marx had solicited young writer George Oppenheimer to write a script for the Marx Brothers based on that very premise. That didn’t get made – Irving Thalberg, then head of production at MGM, went with the George S. Kaufman/Morrie Ryskind script for A Night at the Opera instead – but in 1944 RKO’s “B” movie department got hold of it and made it the basis of a (relatively) serious detective film, The Falcon in Hollywood (see my review at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-falcon-in-hollywood-rko-1944.html). Much of the fun of The Producers comes from the weird encounters Max and Leo go through as they search for the worst possible play, director and star. The worst possible play is called Springtime for Hitler by unrepentant Nazi Franz Liebkind (Kenneth Mars) – the last name means “love child,” by the way – and it’s an attempt to portray Hitler and Eva Braun as a joyous, fun-loving couple whose leadership is making Germany great again and winning World War II. The irony of two Jewish producers attempting to buy a play from a neo-Nazi without either offending him or making them angry is delicious, and fortunately Brooks at least this early in his career was a circumspect enough director not to push this plot point for more than it’s worth.

The worst director is Roger De Bris (Christopher Hewitt), who when Max and Leo show up at his lavish apartment is in full drag – he’s doing it to win a contest at a charity ball, he explains – and his assistant is Carmen Ghia (Andreas Voutzinas), more butch but just as obviously (and stereotypically) Gay. (I remember quite a few critics were surprised when Brooks introduced a sympathetic Gay character, a hairdresser played by Tim Matheson, who was fleeing Nazi persecution in his remake of To Be or Not to Be, since all his previous depictions of Queer folk had been basically as fag jokes – sometimes quite funny fag jokes, but fag jokes nonetheless.) The worst actor is Lorenzo St. Dubois (Dick Shawn), universally known by his initials “L.S.D.,” who wins the part of Adolf Hitler in an open audition by singing a song called “Love Flower” that’s a screamingly funny parody of psychedelic rock. (Dick Shawn did a rock parody with Jim Backus, of all people, in the 1956 film The Opposite Sex – a remake of The Women – and it was so ghastly I remember joking to Charles, “Frankly, I liked him better as Hitler.” The best part of The Producers is the opening number of the show-within-the-film, “Springtime for Hitler,” a marvelous send-up of big musical production numbers (it reaches its high point when Brooks inserts a Busby Berkeley-like overhead shot of the dancers forming a swastika on stage) whose bouncy melody and insipid lyrics (“We’re marching to a faster pace/Watch out, here comes the master race”) give new meaning to Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase about real Nazi Adolf Eichmann, “the banality of evil.”

For some reason Mel Brooks never bothers to explain, a new musical with the title Springtime for Hitler (also Brooks’ original working title for the film) actually attracts a sold-out audience, though as soon as the “Springtime for Hitler” number finishes the audience starts walking out in disgust and we hear a woman’s voice on the soundtrack declare, “Talk about bad taste!” (That would be far from the first time we would hear that complaint about something by Mel Brooks.) Then some of the audience members stop walking out and start returning to their seats as L.S.D. hilariously fractures playwright Liebkind’s lines; as Eva Braun (Renée Taylor) picks at a flower and goes, “Er liebt mir, er liebt mir nicht,” Dick Shawn’s Hitler goes, “I lieb ya, I lieb ya, dir. Now lieb me alone!” “It’s funny!” one theatregoer calls out, and the first act of the play proceeds to lavish merriment while Max and Leo get drunk in a nearby bar and toast to the first and only performance of Springtime for Hitler. When it becomes clear that they have a hit-by-mistake on their hands (“one of those hits by mistake that eternally plague show business,” said Joe Adamson in his biography of the Marx Brothers), Max and Leo try to blow up the theatre to force the play to close – only they blow it by using the quick fuse on their bomb. The last scene shows them in prison, once again promoting a new show called Prisoners in Love and selling their fellow cons 25,000 percent of it.

According to Mel Brooks’ own account in the PBS bio-documentary Mel Brooks: Make a Noise, he had a hard time getting The Producers before the public. He originally conceived of it as a novel, but one publisher rejected it saying, “It’s all dialogue and no descriptions. Why not try to do it as a play?” Brooks rewrote it as a play, only Broadway producer Kermit Bloomgarden told him, “It won’t work as a play; it has too many locations. Why not try to do it as a movie?” Brooks, who’d worked on TV (in the writers’ room of Sid Caesar’s 1950’s series Your Show of Shows with Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, Woody Allen and Larry Gelbart, and later co-creator with Buck Henry of Get Smart!, still the funniest spoof of the whole James Bond mythos) and made best-selling comedy albums with Reiner – notably their series in which Brooks played a 2,000-year-old man and Reiner was the journalist interviewing him about his life, but had never made a movie before, got it green-lighted by Joseph E. Levine, of whom Dwight Macdonald once said, “He’s proof that they didn’t break the mold after they made Louis B. Mayer.” Levine had made his money with a distribution company called Avco Embassy; in the late 1950’s he bought the U.S. rights to a cheaply made Italian swords-and-sandals movie called Hercules starring American-born muscleman Steve Reeves, spent more money promoting it than the Italian producers had spent making it in the first place, and had a huge hit. He financed Brooks’ comedy but then got cold feet about releasing it, apparently fearful that the political leaders of America’s Jewish community would come down on him for a movie that was not only called Springtime for Hitler but asked people to laugh at him. (So had Charlie Chaplin in his 1940 film The Great Dictator, made while Hitler was still alive and the Nazis were at the peak of their power.) Brooks sneaked a print to Peter Sellers, who screened it in his home theatre and loved it so much he took out an ad in one of the Hollywood trade papers saying he’d just seen the funniest movie he’d ever watched, Mel Brooks’ Springtime for Hitler, and it was a total shame that the people reading his trade-paper ad would never get to see it because of Joseph E. Levine’s obstinacy in refusing to release it. (In 1940 John O’Hara had similarly helped shame RKO studios into releasing Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane by writing an article announcing he regretted having just seen the greatest movie ever made, with the greatest lead performance he’d ever seen, and adding, “Reason for regret: You, my dears, may never get to see this picture.”) Levine got the message loud and clear and agreed to release the film as long as Brooks would take the “H”-word out of the title, so they agreed to call it The Producers. It went out to an underwhelming reception at the box office, but as soon as it made it onto network television (which is how I first saw it), it became hailed as a comedy classic. Some parts of The Producers age pretty badly – Mostel seems to overact so relentlessly one wonders what solvent they used to get him off the camera lens after he’d glued himself to it. Brooks also overdid the immaturity gags surrounding Gene Wilder’s character – including giving him a Linus-style security blanket he’s had since he was a baby – and he did one of his sexist gags of having Max and Leo hire as a “receptionist” a blonde Swedish woman who can’t type and doesn’t know English but looks great in a bikini and is willing to go to motels and do “bouncy-bouncy” with the boss. But as with many of Mel Brooks’ films, you forgive him his bad taste because most of it is screamingly funny, and The Producers has held up surprisingly well both as a movie and as what Brooks originally intended it to be, a Broadway play (a musical with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick in the leads) that eventually got filmed itself. The Producers is an acknowledged comedy classic and it helped launch Mel Brooks’ reputation as a filmmaker.