Go watch it. That’s the verdict, and I’ll spend the rest of this telling you why, but I don’t want you sitting through eight paragraphs wondering whether I’m going to recommend a musical comedy about Hitler.
The Producers (2005) is a movie about two men scheming to produce the biggest flop in Broadway history. It cost forty-five million dollars and took in thirty-eight. Mel Brooks could not have written that ending himself, and God knows he tried everything else.
It’s the film of the musical of the movie. Brooks made the original in 1967 with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder and won an Oscar for the screenplay. Thirty-four years later he turned it into a stage musical that took twelve Tonys, still the record. Then he filmed the stage show with its original stars. Three drafts, four decades, one joke that refuses to die.
The scheme is beautiful. Max Bialystock, Nathan Lane, is a producer whose last eleven shows closed on opening night and who now funds himself by romancing rich widows on his office couch. Leo Bloom, Matthew Broderick, is a terrified accountant carrying a blue security blanket, and he notices in passing that a producer could make more money with a flop than a hit. Oversell the shares, mount a disaster, close in one night, keep the difference. Nobody audits a corpse.
So they hunt for the worst play ever written and find Springtime for Hitler, by a Nazi pigeon fancier still living on a Manhattan rooftop, Will Ferrell in a helmet, sincerely. They hire the worst director in New York, who greets them in a gown he swears is the Chrysler Building. They hire a Swedish receptionist, Uma Thurman as Ulla, who can’t type and doesn’t have to. Opening night, the audience decides it’s satire, laughs until it hurts, and hands them a smash — the worst thing that could possibly happen.
Now. “Springtime for Hitler.”
The curtain rises on showgirls wearing pretzels and bratwurst as headdresses. A tenor in an SS uniform sings about Germany being on the march again. And the thing keeps going, past the point where you think the joke must be over, past the point of decency, until the dancers arrange themselves into a swastika and the camera floats up above them in a Busby Berkeley shot that makes you laugh at the audacity of the framing on top of everything else. Then Stroman cuts to the house.
Row after row of New Yorkers in good clothes, mouths open, deciding in real time whether they’re permitted to enjoy this. One woman starts to laugh and covers her mouth. Brooks has said for sixty years that you can’t beat a dictator by arguing with him, you beat him by making him ridiculous, and there is no better demonstration in American film. It’s six minutes long and I have never once wanted it to end.
Two other numbers land almost as hard. “I Wanna Be a Producer” pulls Broderick out of a gray accounting pool, kills the fluorescents, and fills the room with showgirls. His voice is thin and he knows it, and he sings it anyway with the hunger of a man who’s waited his whole life for someone to ask. And “Along Came Bialy” stops dead so a chorus line of women in their eighties can perform a full dance break with aluminum walkers, in formation, on beat. It’s the best choreography in the picture and it belongs to the oldest people in it.
The score is the thing to talk about. Brooks wrote all of it, words and music, in his seventies, having never written for Broadway before. He doesn’t write like a theater composer. He writes like a man raised on the Catskills and Warner Brothers, with soft-shoe, shameless key changes, and rhymes that land like a vaudeville drummer catching them. Buried in the middle of the farce is “Til Him,” where Max and Leo finally say out loud that they love each other, and it’s a genuinely beautiful song. Glen Kelly’s arrangements are why the whole thing sounds like an orchestra instead of a pit band with ambitions.
And the writing. Brooks built this story three separate times, which almost nobody does. The 1967 screenplay is meaner and tighter. The stage book, written with Thomas Meehan, is warmer and gave the thing a heart it never had. What Brooks understood before anyone is that the most offensive premise imaginable becomes harmless the moment it’s ridiculous, and that a Jewish kid from Brooklyn putting Hitler in a chorus line isn’t making light of anything. He’s collecting.
Here’s the real flaw, and it’s worth a paragraph rather than a shrug. Lane and Broderick are playing to the back of a theater that isn’t there. They did this show eight times a week for years, and the performances are calibrated for a room where you have to reach the mezzanine. On film, with a camera eighteen inches from Lane’s face, that reads as too much. The 1967 version has a tenderness between Mostel and Wilder that comes from two actors who could afford to be quiet. This one can’t stop selling. At 134 minutes against the original’s 88, you feel the effort.
It doesn’t matter as much as it should. The film is generous, it’s very funny, and it’s the only permanent record of one of the great Broadway productions with the people who created it still in the parts. Watch the original first if you’ve never seen it. Then watch this one and understand that a man in his seventies looked at the best thing he ever made and decided he could get more out of it.
Stay through the credits. Brooks is in there with a serious message.
