The basic story of its development was that Mel Brooks thought The Producers up as a Broadway show, then more realistically plotted it as a novel and then finally as a movie. More recently, it has become a Broadway show again which is a hit wherever it goes and in a magical realist turn became a second movie. This story holds fast through all of its incarnations and is never not funny. For me, though, nothing has outdone this 1968 film.
That has to do with writing that's sharp as a tack, bold ideas and characters that might almost play themselves were it not for the explosive talents on screen. Zero Mostel thunders as Max, using his girthy physicality and ear splitting bellow. He is a pirate of Manhattan, ruled by his senses and insatiable appetites. And this was the film that turned up and coming dramatic actor into the Gene Wilder of sudden screaming hysterics which served him for the rest of his career. That might seem to sell him short but the Gene Wilder persona gave him a passport to audiences who could not tire of his terrifying comic chops. This brought the darkness essential to the colourful Willy Wonka and got him through the cute pairings with Richard Pryor later in the '70s. Mostel and Wilder teamed up again for the American Film Theatre's Rhinoceros to great effect.
But no subsequent outing ever quite topped the opening of The Producers where the nebbish Leo is driven to inconsolable hysterics by the roaring bear of Max. Wilder takes Leo's breathless agony so close to breaking into fantasy that our own anxiety in the viewing of it has no recourse but to laugh even louder. There's a scene in You Can't Take it With You where Jimmy Stewart is explaining to Jean Arthur how his scream travels through his body, getting tighter and tighter until she's the one who screams. That's as close as I can get to a precedent to Wilder's megaton of panic. Nothing else in film comedy comes close. And this is before we get to its cause.
Zero Mostel's Max needs only seconds to understand how to play Leo. While it does take a lot f trial and error to turn it off, by the time he tries a smile and finds it effective you know he's sorted the deal with the accountant. There are two phases of this. First, he pleas with Leo to cook the books, tightening the tension until he moves right into Leo's ear and screams, "HELP!" And then the more extended seduction of the professional in the office and beyond it to greater Manhattan, infecting Leo with his moreish lust for the good life. It's hard to imagine why this twin assault of character realisations could work until you see it happen. It's in the experience itself which is why the opening twenty minutes of this film always feels fresh.
But then the gags keep coming. Kenneth Mars' Franz Liebkind, author of Springtime for Hitler, shows his ineptitude in concealing his loyalty to the crushed Nazi legacy. ("He's wearing a German helmet!" Leo scream-whispers to Max on seeing Franz for the first time.) He knows he shouldn't be open about it in his adopted New York but the slightest of triggers take him right back to the Swastika beer steins. Can we still laugh at a joke Nazi? We have seen the neo version hook themselves on to protests about anything in the past few years, raising their profile as they lift their hands in the armpit inspection salute. Their public violence seems only to have been encouraged by the attention. However, Brooks knew well that few things are funnier in politics than powerless tyrants, the roaring mice of history. He's not defusing the gravity of Nazism, more saying, "Yeah, well who won?"
Roger De Bris is the flamboyant disaster of directors is played with glee by Christopher Hewitt. His personal assistant, Carmen Ghia (yes, just like the car), is more openly gay and this is the source of humour. De Bris enters his first scene in a tight fitting ball gown which he completes with a permy looking wig. The banter between the two is brittle camp, bitchy and intimidating. While we are clearly meant to identify with Max and Leo's discomfort, I feel that the portrayals survive well, not as definitive examples of gay men but two bound companions in the theatre world who know each other just a little too well, gay or not. What stereotyping there was in 1968 can be safely disposed of today. The scene will still be funny.
How about Ulla, then, the Swedish P.A. apparently hired from the yellow pages of the sex trade? Fresh out of Uni when my humour bypass was still in effect, this was a stumbling block for me. The point here is not that she's an archetypical dumb blonde but that Max's grasping response to his ill gotten wealth is to expose his pitiable vanity by all but buying a beautiful, young woman he doesn't even have to speak to. She's a trophy and, if that was ever a point of audience to Max empathy that moment is long past.
Where the creaks really show and persistently, though, is in the actor chosen by the team to play Hitler. He wanders in, expecting to audition for a hippy musical. After hours of show songs (delivered in a dizzying montage) Laurence St Dubois, or LSD, brings his band on to do something more up to date. The song is so good it could be a Doors parody, escalating from love power to, "hey world, you stink!" The problem is not the datedness of the music or even attitude; any Zillenial groover could do as much and in and add some tasty ambiguity. It's the reactions from the crew whose wide eyed gapes are shown in still shots (this also happens in the production scenes and I still don't quite get it). It's scarcely credible that theatre types in the Age of Aquarius would be so gobsmacked (of course, it's the imagined audience's response that's being evoked but still). Today, you might have someone make self harm a feature of the audition piece but then the further you go along that way the harder you'd have to work to bring it back to comedy.
The shocks work better when the curtain goes up and we see the opening number. This is still incredible, from the Nazi dancing, the Miss Pretzel and Miss Beer, the ship guns puffing off toward the audience to the big finish where the chorus line circles in formation as a huge swastika. "Springtime for Hitler and Germany. Winter for Poland and France." The twist this leads to (no spoilers, I don't care how old it is) is a surprisingly relaxing one but then we get the real finale which carries us back to the opening punch.
Mel Brooks didn't always reach this standard afterwards. Everything that followed had its moments and Young Frankenstein approaches equity as a whole film. But if none of those other titles made it out of the gate The Producers would stand as a moment of genius whose electric punch of an opening is maintained continually and reinforced with charges of equal power right through to the risky success of actually showing the stage show and pushing it repeatedly. If it hadn't done that we might have seen it if we set the auld VCR for a 3a.m. appearance back when they did that. It bothers me that the more recent musical might block people from discovering this shorter, deeper and funnier original but I'm confident that any who do make the journey past will find its treasure.
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