User reviews

When you see a movie once and think it's hilarious, that's a good sign. When you see a movie about a half-dozen times and think it's still hilarious, that's more than a good sign. That means that not only can you put up with seeing it multiple times, but you also find new things that you didn't see before. Plus, there are some scenes that are too hilarious not to laugh at! The chemistry between stars doesn't hurt, either. What movie am I talking about? Mel Brooks' The Producers, his most sustained and inspired piece of lunacy!

Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel have amazing chemistry as meek accountant Leo Bloom and scheming Broadway producer Max Bialystock. Max seduces little old ladies for checks, and when Leo comes into his office one day, he finds that a producer can make more money with a flop instead of a hit. They decide to do his ploy, and create the world's worst play, Springtime for Hitler (a gay romp with Adolf and Eva), and meet interesting characters, including author Franz Liebkind (Kenneth Mars), director Roger DeBris (Christopher Hewett), and their Hitler, Lorenzo St.DuBois, aka L.S.D. (Dick Shawn).

What makes this comedy such a gem is its mixture of types of comedy. There is slapstick, there's satire, there's bad taste, and everything but the kitchen sink! The scenes I have seen so many times, but what makes me love them is how they, mainly Wilder, play their roles. Wilder is somewhat crazy, and relies on his blanket to calm himself down. Not only does he have comic perfection, he's a darned good actor to boot! Mostel is great as the would-be sleazy loser-producer, with eye movements that put Silent Bob to shame and a great voice.

The songs in it are great, also. Two of them were written by Brooks himself, `Springtime for Hitler' (with which I have auditioned for a role in a musical with) and `Prisoners of Love'. They're both very funny (real Brooks-ian) (note to Merriam-Webster: include that word right next to `bling-bling'). It's not exactly a musical, but The Producers is in a class of its own. Long live The Producers!

My rating: 9/10

Rated PG for bad taste and homosexual themes.

There are so many laughs in THE PRODUCERS (long before Mel Brooks lost his magic touch), that you'll be in tears by the time Brooks gets to his "Springtime for Hitler" routine. ZERO MOSTEL's early scenes with ESTELLE WINWOOD are hilarious enough, but he and GENE WILDER top themselves by the time you get to the frantic ending.

LEE MEREDITH is the curvy Ulla who can shake a mean hip and DICK SHAWN is the hilariously daffy Lorenzo St. DuBois (LSD for short), and everyone in the cast has a fine time delivering over-the-top performances in the spirit in which this sort of satire requires.

The story is simply that of a producer running short on cash who devises a scheme whereby if he produces the worst musical in the world, he can actually get his investment back and then some. He convinces his mild-mannered bookkeeper GENE WILDER to join him in the scheme and then the fun gets off to a great start.

The climactic "Springtime for Hitler" is just one of the delirious highlights (if politically incorrect by today's standards), and is probably the reason so many of the comments here resent the film and everything it stands for. But there's no getting away from it--the script is downright brilliant and original--winning an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and numerous other writing awards including an award from The Writer's Guild of America.

Summing up: Mel Brooks at his wittiest.

Mel brooks' first attempt at directing is this film " The Producers, " originally entitled "Spring Time For Hitler." It's the story of down and out producer Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel), once known as the 'King of Broadway' who can't believe his incredible streak of bad luck. Once when the Moon of his Fortune rode high, he had Six shows running at once. However now-a-days he's so poor, he wears a Cardboard belt. Into his life arrives a timid little man named Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder). As an accountant, he makes a startling discovery. In his last play Max, raised more money to produce his show than he needed. As a result, Leo speculates Max could make more money with a flop, than with a hit. Max demands to know how and a crooked scheme develops. Max decides to find the worse play ever written. He will then hire the worse, director, the worse actors and then raise a $1,000.000 for a flop of a play which is sure to close the first night, allowing Max to keep all the rest of the money. This then is the plot and with Bloom becoming his partner, the pair plans on keeping the fortune. The movie which also casts Dick Shawn as 'L.S.D.' or Lorenzo St. DuBois, Kenneth Mars as Franz Liebkind, Christopher Hewett and Roger De Bris all combine to create a wonderful masterpiece of hysterical madcap comedy. It is with little wonder this film began as an unwanted idea and ended up becoming the surprise hit of the decade. A milestone for Mel Brooks, but a Classic for any audience. ****

Why this movie is brilliant and funny: 1-A hilarious Gene Wilder with his amazing freak-out moments. I think many actors copied his scenes from this film.

2-Excellent satire about hitler and nazis. Many lines from this film are recognizable and became a comedy standard.

3-Amazing performance by Dick Shaw as L. S. D and as the theatrical hitler. He is funny and subversive at the same time.

4-Great 1on1 scenes with the main actors, especially the ones which involve heavy physical acting.

5- It is intelligent filmmaking which shows how progressive and funny Mel Brooks was; and that was his first film...

Just watch it, it's 1,5h and it's beautifully funny! 10/10.

THE PRODUCERS might just be the funniest film ever made. It stars Zero Mostel, as a bankrupt Broadway producer, and Gene Wilder, as his emotionally-retarded accountant. Together, they figure that they could actually make more money producing a flop than a hit, so they become producers and put on "Springtime for Hitler," a sure-fire flop. However, things go horribly "right," and soon the producers find themselves in a tight spot trying to repay their investors. It is not the flop they hoped for, and they wind up in jail, with a hilarious finale.

This is Mel Brooks' masterpiece. Brooks' won an Oscar for Best Screenplay-1968-no surprise,as this is as funny a film ever to be made! The song should've won an Oscar, as it is one of the most hilarious tunes to come out of any movie.

From what I have heard about it I was a little disappointed with this Mel Brooks creation. The movie has aged poorley, with many jokes that aren't funny. It's often slow and draged out, but the jokes that do work almost makes up for it. The best thing about it is the general plot idea and the climax. Overall, the movie was okay and interesting to watch but it's lacking something.

A down-on-his-luck Broadway producer, Max Biolystock (Zero Mostel), is reduced to funding his shows by romancing old ladies for cash. Enter neurotic accountant Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder), arriving at Biolystock's apartment to do his books. Upon discovering that Biolystock had extorted $2000.00 from his last Broadway flop, Bloom, simply on a whim, mentions to Biolystock that he could've made a fortune on the flop if he'd only gotten more money from the old ladies. Needless to say, this revelation gets Max's mind working---get the old ladies to invest $1,000,000 on what Biolystock knows will be a surefire flop, then run off with the excess cash! Max convinces the gullible Leo to join him on the scheme, and off the two men go, on a crusade to produce the biggest disaster Broadway has ever seen. They come across a god-awful work written by a former Nazi (Kenneth Mars) called "Springtime For Hitler," and decide to produce it. If it's a flop, Max & Leo will become rich. But if it's a hit, they'll go to jail....

If you're one of the infinite many who've been unable to secure any of those scorching-hot tickets to Mel Brooks' current Broadway phenomenon, "The Producers," there's always this, the original 1968 movie version to watch & enjoy. This Oscar-winner for Best Screenplay is a comedy classic, and easily Mel Brooks' masterpiece, a brilliantly funny film that hasn't aged a bit. Zero Mostel & Gene Wilder are hilarious & perfectly cast as the con-artist producers, with terrific chemistry between them (just their opening scene together, including the great bits about Leo's blue blanket, and Leo terrified of being jumped on by Max, is already one of the great filmed moments of comic acting). Kudos all around to the rest of the cast, too: Kenneth Mars as the deranged Nazi playwright of "Springtime For Hitler," Christopher Hewett as the no-talent gay director who only makes "Springtime" even more misguided than it already is, Dick Shawn in an outrageous performance as L.S.D., the hippie ham who lands the coveted role of Hitler (his audition song, "Love Power," is a major highlight), and the gorgeous Lee Meredith as Ulla, Max & Leo's dimwitted secretary. And then there's the "Springtime For Hitler" production number itself---yes, it's everything you've ever heard about it, a wonderfully hysterical "you gotta see it to believe it" moment in film comedy.

Mel Brooks' direction is spot on, and his hysterical screen writing here has never been better (though his co-writing with Gene Wilder on "Young Frankenstein" comes close). His Oscar win for the screenplay was very well deserved, indeed. "The Producers" is a timeless comedy classic, and the defining moment of Mel Brooks' long illustrious film career.

Leave it to Leo Bloom to figure out the possibilities in having the worst show on Broadway, and yet, make a bundle by collecting a small fortune from innocent old ladies investing their savings in it. It's no wonder Max Bialystock jumps for joy upon hearing about how to really succeed in show business without really trying!

This 1968 version of Mel Brooks' "The Producers" is a much better film than the recent one unveiled at the end of 2005. We had watched the original movie some time ago and we thought it was quite funny. On second viewing though, some of the fun one had that first time, seems to have disappeared somehow. It seems inconceivable, but this time we found little to laugh about, although this version should have been the definite one because of the presence of Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder is far superior than the stars seen on the latest version.

Zero Mostel was a colossus in the New York stage. He was a man who could do anything at all and still give an honest performance to everything he did. It was Mr. Mostel's misfortune to have been blacklisted at a time where his career was at an all time high. When film work stopped, Mr. Mostel had the theater to go back. Who knows how far this actor would have gone if he hadn't been a victim of the McCarthym that ruined many lives.

Zero Mostel made a creation out of Max Bialystock. This was a man who had seen better days in his producing career days and now finds himself dodging his creditors because he doesn't have the money to pay his debts and has to rely in his stable of old ladies for living. Zero Mostel was the perfect man to play this larger than life character.

Gene Wilder, whose second film this is, showed from the beginning to be a genius in the movies. His Leo Bloom was an excellent creation and his chemistry with Zero Mostel seems to be real. The film owes a great deal of its success to Gene Wilder who acts as the straight man.

In supporting roles we see Kenneth Mars as the lunatic author of the musical. Christopher Hewett is the gay director who turns the material into a great musical. Lee Meredith makes Ulla fun to watch. Dick Shawn who plays Hitler, makes a good impression. Also some other faces in the cast, Estelle Winwood, Renee Taylor, William Hickey, Frank Campanella, Madelyn Cates, all New York based actors with long experience in the stage and screen.

Mel Brooks was going for laughs, and at times, he succeeds brilliantly.

The DVD release of "The Producers" sends me every viewing back to 1968 when I first saw this brilliant, barrier-smashing comedy. Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder were the perfect pair to bring to life the adventures of a Broadway faded impresario, now a con man, and his neurotic, hyper, accountant accomplice.

Together they fleece old ladies, something Mostel's Max Bialystock was doing before the auditor, Max Bloom, came by to check the books. Mostel's seduction of the old, the awful and the ugly has no equal in movie physical comedy.

The scheme: put on the worst flop imaginable and when it closes virtually after opening night the two scammers snare riches: the investments they don't have to return. But if the show is a hit...

The producers' vehicle, "Springtime for Hitler," both brought audiences to a new level of appreciation for the malleable, creative power of film and...it made some viewers genuinely nervous, even upset.

Following Steve Allen's observation that a formula for comedy based on history is Tragedy+Time, director Mel Brooks brought to the screen, less than a quarter century after World War II ended, Dick Shawn as a campy fuehrer surrounded by the Nazi counterpart of the Rockettes. And Max and Leo are clearly Jewish in character if not so openly identified.

Kenneth Mars grabs laughs as the author of "Springtime for Hitler," an unreconstructed, Hitler-adoring flake who raises pigeons on the roof of a Manhattan tenement while accoutered in the odd leftovers of Wehrmacht uniforms.

When I fitted in seeing "The Producers" in its opening week I sat in the middle of an audience that was, to a certain extent, as befuddled as the film's playgoers watching the first part of the intended-to-outrage musical comedy about the Third Reich. Not only were SS uniforms, swastikas and photos of Hitler on the "stage" but the movie theater audience also digested, perhaps for the first time, a send-up of an uproarious gay couple, two real queens. One is effeminate to the core, the other is a cross-dresser (and a faultlessly garish one at that). This kind of stuff hadn't been done before in a Hollywood flick.

1968's audience had many who well-remembered World War II and some had fought in the conflict. I knew people who admitted feeling that the horrific global battle against Hitler had been trivialized by Brooks and his extroverted cast - until they could no longer hold back guffaws that segued rapidly into uncontrolled laughter.

That "The Producers" is also now a runaway Broadway hit is no surprise and I'd love to see a DVD release with Lane and Broderick. However fine they would be, it's the original that broke barriers.

The DVD has a number of worthwhile features including a fascinating "Making of..." segment. Peter Seller's short, famous encomium is read and there are the usual other additions. An outtake presenting an alternative blow-up of the "Springtime for Hitler" theater is interesting, largely because it shows how perceptive Brooks was in scrapping it for the shorter scene actually used.

"The Producers" is, in some ways, a subversive movie. Without stridently proclaiming a new aesthetic, it is exactly that and so it's a timeless classic. This is not satire about Nazism, Hitler and the Third Reich. It's treating as suitable material for slapstick and quick gags the detritus of an evil time.

But it's also a bit dated, no subject is taboo today for comedic treatment, and many who see it for the first time (as my teenage son did tonight) will enjoy the movie without getting the full impact of its assault on conventionality.

Is there any historical topic that will not, in the passage of time, be employed for pure comedy? Is it possible that the next generation will laugh at a comedy parodying Auschwitz? I hope not but I also can't be sure.

Many years ago I refused to watch "Hogan's Heroes" on TV because I personally knew former U.S. POWs. But that show, with Werner Klemperer as Colonel Klink, was very popular. "Hogan's Heroes" was to TV what "The Producers" was, and is, to film. And both made a mark that will be emulated as future generations go beyond satire to humorous treatment of matters most today consider beyond the pale of acceptability as a vehicle for laughs.

10/10

This was Mel Brook's first big success which he wrote, directed but did not act in. Over three decades later he turned it into a successful Broadway play and there was a remake with Nathan Lane in 2005. The legendary black-listed comedian Zero Mostel (one of the original Hollywood Undesirable 12) plays a failed Broadway producer Max Bialystok who has taken to scamming old ladies. A young Gene Wilder (the fish-faced enemy of the people) is an accountant who has the disastrous idea that an unsuccessful play can earn more money than a successful one.

He and Max sell shares for their sure-fire flop Springtime for Hitler - written by a Nazi psycho. They sell shares for slightly more than 100% - more in the vicinity of 25,000%, but thats OK because a play portraying Hitler as the hero is bound to fail right? Wrong! We have the lead actor playing Hitler - called LSD (another in-joke I think!)to thank for that.

While some of the dialogue is certainly funny, personally I think the film didn't age too well. I saw it for the famed Zero who originated the Tevye role in Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway, because I'd never seen him before in any movie. But, I understand the Nathan Lane remake is better.

I don't know if I'll see that soon, but anyone wanting to see The Producers may want to watch the newer version instead which is supposed to be better than the original.

I know more people who quote lines from THE PRODUCERS than from Shakespeare; make of that what you will! :-) That said, people seem to either love it or hate it, but most folks I know agree this nutzoid farce has, to quote groovy LSD (delightful Dick Shawn), "Love Power!" Writer/director Mel Brooks' insanely zany yet strangely sweet tale of down-on-his-luck Broadway producer Max Bialystock (the great Zero Mostel, who should have been nominated for an Oscar himself) who uses his powers of persuasion (and wheedling, and bellowing, and conning :-) to convince meek accountant Leo Bloom (justifiably Oscar-nominated Gene Wilder) to help him make a surefire Broadway flop that, if their nutty book-cooking scheme works, will land them in Rio -- or, if it doesn't work, Sing Sing. This screamingly funny, no-holds-barred comedy won Mel Brooks an Oscar for Best Screenplay and put the former YOUR SHOW OF SHOWS writer on the map as a filmmaker. Anyone trying to make a comedy depending on controversy and questionable taste for its laughs should watch THE PRODUCERS first and see how a master does it! For that matter, Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder ought to watch it again themselves; after the duds they were churning out for a while there, maybe they need a refresher course in how to be funny. (Hell, it might be as simple as them teaming up again; Wilder seemed able to temper Brooks's mania for poo-poo humor and Brooks seemed able to help Wilder to better balance out his trademark blend of shrill hysteria and sweetness.) Much as my family and I also loved the Broadway and film editions of the musical version co-written by Brooks and Thomas Meehan and starring the incomparable Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick (even though I felt that Broderick wasn't quite as good as Leo Bloom as Lane was as Max Bialystock. That said, together they have great buddy chemistry), the original is still the champ.

The Producers is a loud, make that very LOUD movie. Characters shout at the top of their lungs in a hysterical manner. I thought the film was pretty funny, mostly the scenes with Dick Shawn. The Producers is a very fun film, that is quite overrated in my opinion. It is certainly not the best comedy ever -- nor Mel Brook's best.

The opening title scene is a little funny, but not the rest of the movie. The performances are, especially Zero Mostel's, extremely overacted which belong to the night club, not on the screen. Mel Brooks never learns that "less is more" in terms of film acting. His funniness is somewhere lost between light comedy and slapstick.

The entire movie is like a stage play. Every scene drags too long. I can hardly finish watching it. Wonder how it got an Oscarr Award for Best Screenplay?

This is a classic film with wonderful performances all around (although I didn't take to Dick Shawn's as much as the others). Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder were perfect casting as was Christopher Hewitt (later to be known as TV's "Mr. Belvedere"). What's even more impressive are the various elements of truth that are beneath the histerical if not obsurbed storyline. The current Broadway hit doesn't compete with this film. The performances are good on stage but not as wonderful as here. Due to long term business problems this film wasn't released for home video and cable until much later then it should have been. Outright broad comedy and silliness belong in our daily lives and this film offers them very well. EVERYONE should see this film!

This movie IS funny, all right, but not as funny as everyone claims it is. Ok, there are two or three hilarious moments, but what is there beyond that? I kept smiling throughout the movie but I hardly laughed. It is definitely cleverly written though. I wouldn't argue about that. Actually , I think that The Producers' best feature is the underlying comment it makes on the unreasonable acclaim that cheap products (plays, movies, songs etc.) get from the masses sometimes. It is a very good satire, I just wish there had been a different ending, perhaps a less "easy" and obvious one. It is worth watching, though. I haven't regretted watching it by any means.

almost 7

I saw this movie in anticipation of the new one and the Broadway play. It was disappointing after hearing about how great the play was. because Mel Brooks didn't use as many jokes as he normally does, and the two stars of the movie, Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel, were not as good as they could be. Neither of them had very many quirks, except for Mostel's sexual quirk, which is almost completely ignored in the whole movie except the beginning. A couple of rare moments in the movie shined, however, with Mel Brooks-type quirks. One example is the audition for the part of Adolf Hitler with many hysterical freaks trying to do what they think is excellent but truly pathetic. It ends with LSD's audition, which is funny as $#**! The other part is the Busby Berkely opening of the musical, making fun of Nazis, etc. However, towards the end the movie starts to seem more like a semi-adventure movie, which doesn't fit any of the movie's makers at all.

I'm not a fan of Mel Brooks. At all. For a comedy director, I find him painfully unfunny and therefore very difficult to like. The Producers is often cited to be Brooks' best film, and for good reason; as it is. Although it never reaches the realms of hilarity, and quite a few of the gags aren't funny in the slightest, it's a breezy little comedy that's based around an amusing idea and is hard to dislike on the whole. The idea is that a Broadway producer can, in theory, make more money from a flop than he could from a hit. When accountant Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder) suggests that this could be the case, a plan forms in the mind of once great producer Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel), and we're on course for an amusing ride as the two set out to find the worst play ever written (a drama called "Springtime for Hitler" eventually wins out), and pull out all the stops to ensure it's a sure-fire Broadway flop!

Through a stark colour scheme and overacting from all concerned, Mel Brooks succeeds in creating a distinct comic-book style that lends the film a very comedic, and fun, edge that few films have succeeded in capturing adequately since. The cast helps this film enormously, with everyone giving hammy performances that help in creating the film's sense of fun. Brooks regular Gene Wilder is, of course, the star of the show despite not being the absolute central character. His performance is more subdued than Mostel's, but still very over the top. The play itself features a very tasteless, yet very amusing and catchy opening song that will no doubt be swirling around your head for days afterwards. The play itself is actually the funniest thing about the film, with most of the hilarity coming from the monumental miscasting of an Elvis impersonator-esquire character calling himself 'L.S.D.' (Dick Shawn) in the role of the fuhrer himself.

Overall, this is a very fun film. The sense of fun is carried throughout, even if the jokes don't always work. I can almost guarantee a good time from watching this movie and it's one that fans of this sort of film shouldn't go without seeing.

In 21st Century America, the one feature of The Producers that astounds even today is the boisterous, exaggerated, confrontational impulsiveness of its two lead performances. But in 1968, the film's content was like a suicide bombing of the audience's idea of good manners. There's such greed in its heroes, such merry deceit, such eagerness to concede every ethic, that the 1968 audience just had to surrender, stick with it. How did Brooks get away with that? By proving the dishonorable struggle of both lead characters at the start, by casting them with actors you couldn't help liking. Mostel's Max Bialystock is a man whose yearnings are so measureless they exonerate his voracity. There's a scene where he rubs his grubby office window with coffee, peeps through the dirt, sees a white Rolls-Royce and shouts, "That's it, baby! When you've got it, flaunt it!" You can drink a tall glass of his gluttonous self-indulgence. "Look at me now! I'm wearing a cardboard belt!" It's characteristic of this movie that after he says the line, he rips off the belt, tears it to smithereens.

Mostel, a distinguished thespian, blacklist foil, and academic, here gives a tour de force of low comedy. Regardless of a comb-over that starts just above his clavicle, he propels buoyant egotism, spitting on his hand to slick back his hair before an elderly female investor enters for her weekly frolic. What Mostel propels in particular is unreserved self-assurance. He never has doubts. Maybe he never thinks at all, just simply carries on out of evolutionary necessity.

Wilder was a fresh mug in 1968, familiarized to audiences with a significant supporting role in Bonnie and Clyde a year before, also as a rather hysterical character. His performance in The Producers is a tinge short of cardiac arrest. On the floor with Mostel over him, he shrieks, "Don't jump! Don't jump!" Mostel begins to leap in a flurry. "I'm hysterical! I'm hysterical!" Mostel pours a glass of water and chucks it in his face. Wilder serves a perfect line: "I'm wet! I'm hysterical, and I'm wet! I'm in pain, and I'm wet, and I'm still hysterical!" Gene and Zero reel on the floor so violently we expect them to chew on one another. Mostel's so overexcited and feral, Wilder so flustered and frantic, you marvel that slobber didn't get on the camera lens. The entire movie's toned on that plane of turbulent anxiety. One of the delights of watching it is to see how the actors are able to manage timing and distinctions even while shrieking. Timing is in the hands of actors, but without scripts, there would be loads of tedious improvisation. Good timing in the written words is the gateway to good timing on screen. I'm sure we'd be surprised at how snappish the dialogue seems on the page. But Brooks, a veteran nightclub act himself, leaves space for delivery while simultaneously working economically with form. Characters repeat the last thing another character said to extend the laugh. Characteristic of Brooks, that's often what causes the laugh. Language is ecstasy to him.

Kenneth Mars is a militant live-action cartoon, up on the roof with his pigeons, singing Nazi songs, later commanding an audience member to stop laughing because "I am the author! I outrank you!" Brooks includes gay jokes, with the ostentatious couple of Broadway director Roger De Bris and his right-hand Carmen Giya. At one point Max, Leo and Carmen crowd into a teeny elevator, and are ejected breathless and ill-at-ease. Heterosexuality's epitomized by the nubile Lee Meredith, as Ulla, the voluptuous secretary, who types one letter at a time then stops for a pat-on-the-back smile. The other terrific performance is by Dick Shawn as the actor who plays Hitler. In a movie made at the pinnacle of the hipster era, he's a hippie comprised out of archetypal junk scraps, with his finger cymbals, soup can necklace and knee-high shag boots.

To produce a musical named Springtime for Hitler is naturally in the worst achievable taste, as an exiting audience member remarks in the movie, to the glee of Bialystock and Bloom, who're depending upon precisely that response. To make a movie about such a musical was also in bad taste, apparently. It's clear that Bialystock and Bloom are Jewish, but they never touch on that. As Franz Liebkind rages, they nod, because the more repugnant he is, the more liable his play will fail. Brooks throws in merely one brief flash to indicate their personal feelings. As the two men walk away from the playwright's apartment, Bloom covers the red-and-black Nazi armband Franz has given him. "All right, take off the armband," says Bialystock, taking off his own. They throw both armbands into a garbage can and spit in it.

Whilst jabbing at the troubles of Broadway, Brooks' directorial debut's concerned with two overtly Jewish characters who are, in the best tradition of Jewish comedy, doomed to failure, in a film steaming with conflict on every level. Whilst there may be a prominently Jewish-American sensibility about Brooks' work, it's a feature that he's chosen to leave out after this film, apart from the Yiddish Native American chief in Blazing Saddles, the metal detector scene in High Anxiety, occasional comments in To Be or Not To Be and the fictitious trailer for Jews in Space in History of the World Part I. But what he's maintained, and what I feel---having grown up in a family of Brooks fanatics---is what makes a particular generation enjoy him so insatiably, is a pure audacity, mischievous delight, eagerness to leap any bound for a laugh. They'll say, "Ah, comedy today's all eff this, eff that, fart on this, have sex with that. It's all bad taste." And I say, look at your boy Mel. He knows better than any of them: Bad taste can taste the best.

For Mel Brooks, The Producers is the gift that keeps on giving. The film, the Broadway musical based on the film, the second film based on the Broadway musical...maybe you can make more money with a flop than with a hit but I'm sure Brooks has done just fine for himself with The Producers. And this is certainly no flop.

A plot summary seems rather unnecessary as most everyone should be familiar with the story. And the story is really secondary anyway, there really only to set up a succession of jokes, sight gags and one outrageously funny, utterly brilliant musical number. The film is not always uproariously funny. For much of its running time it inspires mild chuckles rather than gut-busting laughs. It's a movie that certainly has its moments but it is not consistently hilarious. But just when you think this might be just another reasonably amusing comedy it happens. "Springtime for Hitler." The musical number so perfect, so outrageous, so impossibly funny that it elevates the movie as a whole. In this moment everything comes together and the comic payoff is priceless.

Some of the jokes and gags do fall a little flat but overall the film always manages to be entertaining. The cast is terrific. If it is true that opposites attract Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder could not be any more perfect in their roles as Max and Leo, the producers themselves. The bombastic Mostel and jittery Wilder play off one another brilliantly. They are the two central characters but they are surrounded by a terrific ensemble which really brings the lunacy of Mel Brooks to life. Kenneth Mars as a deranged Nazi playwright, Christopher Hewett as a ludicrously flamboyant Broadway director and Dick Shawn as a hippie Hitler are among the standouts. And while her screen time is minimal Lee Meredith is an absolute treat in the role of Ulla, Max's Swedish receptionist. Ulla may not be much of a receptionist but she sure is fun to watch. In the end The Producers is a real treat. Other movies may be more consistently funny but this one is certainly funny enough. And it has that one transcendent moment which is simply as good as film comedy gets. Well done Mel Brooks. Turns out you can make plenty of money with a hit.

The Producers has very much made its mark on popular culture... the successful Broadway show, West End show and recent remake would all go to suggest that this is some kind of comedy masterpiece. I'm afraid to say it is not.

The plot contains some good ideas and a couple of brilliant ones. But the script is juvenile, crude and generally silly without being funny. The two central performances are way over the top and there is a real problem with the comic timing.

The highlight is the opening song of the musical and the petrified audience reaction. The rest of the movie, frankly, sucks. Carry On Nurse is funnier.