THE PRODUCERS: Blu-ray re-master (Avco/Embassy, 1968) Kino Lorber

How does one take a truly tasteless and utterly absurd premise and transform it into high art? Arguably, one doesn’t and/or cannot – except, of course, if the man behind the camera is Mel Brooks and the movie in question is The Producers (1968), a show within a show of such grotesque amusements, of so much ‘low’ to ‘no’ brow premised entertainment value other than to titillate, shock, revile and disgust that, oddly enough, it cannot help but excel at frustrating the funny bone and tickle its talents to wild-eyed distraction as undiluted and acidic farce. There’s something here to pretty much insult everyone’s sense of propriety and decorum…and that’s part of its charm. The Producers is raunchy, tawdry, ballsy good fun done deliberately in bad taste. That is, perhaps, the cream of its jest. The film is a sleeper wrapped inside the enigma of a flop, done much in the same way as the fictional producing team of Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) and Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder), who desperately hope their arrogant and insulting Broadway review - ‘Springtime for Hitler’ – will be a colossal flop, enraptured within the illusion of a hit. Unhappy chance for the schemers their play is reinterpreted by the critics as a subversive smash instead of the proverbial crash n’ burn. Ironically, Brooks – who not only authored the play but its two big production numbers, ‘Springtime for Hitler’ and ‘Prisoners of Love’ – could not read a note of music. Instead, he hummed his compositions into a tape recorder, later given over to composer, John Morris to write the proper notes to accompany Brooks’ lyrics. Brooks is actually the voice we hear when actor, Tucker Smith mouths the words, “Don’t be stupid. Be a smarty. Come and join the Nazi party!”  The entire modus operandi of The Producers was Brooks’ sublime vengeance against that infamous leader of the Third Reich. Upon the picture’s release, Brooks, accompanied by Anne Bancroft, stepped into an elevator with an unknown woman who, immediately recognizing him, felt compelled to criticize his movie as ‘vulgar’ to which Brooks wryly shot back, “Lady, it rose below vulgarity!”

The concept for The Producers had been fermenting with Brooks for some time. Indeed, he originally conceived it as a non-musical play, then – a novel, before electing to make it into a movie instead. Brooks made mention of ‘Springtime for Hitler’ in a 1966 Playboy interview, later adding, “One of my lifelong jobs is to make the world laugh at Adolf Hitler. The only real way I could get even with Hitler and company was to bring them down with laughter.” This viewpoint was hardly backed by the critics at the time, nor by various Jewish organizations who expressed their outrage with a barrage of letter-writing to Brooks and the studio; correspondences, individually replied to by Brooks in kind. And Brooks, while standing behind his work once it had hit theater screens, at the outset, at least, must have harbored his own apprehensions about proceeding with his due course into farce. Reportedly, on the first day’s shoot, instead of calling ‘Action’ to kick-start the scene, Brooks instead nervously yelled, “Cut!” During its incubation, Brooks had aspired to cast his Greenwich Village neighbor, Dustin Hoffman as Bloom. Hoffman, however, preferred the part of Franz Liebkind. At this juncture, Hoffman, with Brooks’ blessing, auditioned for the part of Benjamin in The Graduate (1967), Brooks believing he would never be offered the role as, on stage, it had been embodied by the typical California blonde-haired ‘surfer dude’ archetype, which Hoffman decidedly was not. Evidently, the director of that movie – Mike Nichols – decided to go another route. Hoffman was cast. The Graduate’s gain, though not – perhaps – The Producers loss. It seems impossible today to fathom anyone but Gene Wilder in the role of Bloom, although producer, Joseph E. Levine wanted Wilder fired after viewing his early rushes, believing Wilder’s performance a total disaster that would sink the picture. Levine even offered Brooks $35,000 to ‘find someone better’. Mercifully, Brooks stuck to his guns and backed the actor. Wilder was hardly well-known, or even well-regarded as a box office ‘commodity’ at the time, so destitute, in fact, he excused himself from the preliminary interview to collect on a $55 check awaiting him at the unemployment office.

Brooks modeled The Producers on his own experiences, working for a chronically cash-strapped theatrical producer while still in his teens, a man – to remain nameless in Brooks’ recollections, but who, reportedly, slept with all his elderly female investors to secure funds for his real ‘passion’ projects. Also, in Manhattan, Brooks recalled a pair of failed showmen who had “more or less failed their way into prosperity…doing flop after flop and living like kings. A press agent told me, 'God forbid they should ever get a hit, because they'd never be able to pay off the backers!' BANG! There was my story!” For the part of the anti-Christ-driven scoundrel, Bialystock (given the name of a Polish city, once home to a prominent Jewish community before WWII), Brooks always had Zero Mostel in mind. Alas, Mostel proved the temperamental artist, clashing with Brooks on almost every scene. Their working relationship proved so tempestuous, Brooks reasoned never to work with the actor again, although he certainly admired his performance in the picture. Much later, and long after Mostel’s death, Brooks reminisced about their troubled alliance, “Zero had everything… energy…brains - he was very smart - smart actor - he had power, he understood who his character was at all times, and he was unashamed, he was very brave. A lot of actors hide in their characters, but a lot of the real Zero came out through Max Bialystock.” Part of Mostel’s irritability may have stemmed from his own self-loathing, in regards to his balloonish figure. “I’ll forever be known as that fat guy in The Producers!” Mostel rather prophetically jested when the movie came out. Yet, if he harbored a certain resentment towards Brooks, Mostel could not have been more congenial towards Gene Wilder. “You may have heard stories about how bombastic, aggressive, and dictatorial Zero might be,” Wilder later defended his co-star, “It didn't happen with me. He always took care of me. I loved him. He looked after me as if I were a baby sparrow."  Indeed, Wilder, so utterly nervous upon meeting Mostel for the very first time, was put at ease when, in extending his hand in friendship, he was instead heartily embraced by his rotund co-star, who wasted no time planting a kiss on his lips.

Brooks – then, a novice director – had been given unprecedented autonomy by its producer, Sidney Glazier, based solely on Brooks’ long-time association with Sid Caesar, and also, owed for his appreciation of Brooks’ collaborative audio recording with Carl Reiner on The 2,000-Year-Old Man. Determined to make good, Brooks furthered his cause by offering to make the picture for less than a third of his normal fee. Glazier agreed, raising $600,000 in record time to kick-start the process. Curiously, The Producers owes its longevity not to Glazier’s foresight, nor Mostel’s iconic performance, nor Gene Wilder’s nor even Mel Brooks’ audacity to see it through, but rather, to comedian and film-star, Peter Sellers. Initially turning down the part of Bloom, but now having had the opportunity to privately screen the movie, and, upon discovering producer, Joseph E. Levine was contemplating shelving it indefinitely, Sellers launched an aggressive ‘one-man’ PR campaign to press Levine into allowing the public to be the film’s final arbitrators in ‘good taste’. The centerpiece of the ‘show within the show’ remains ‘Springtime for Hitler’ – a garish goose-stepping production number in which Brooks evokes the specter of Nazism with full flourishes of flag-waving furor for der Führer. As the theater used to film this gargantuan spectacle did not possess an orchestra pit, production designer, Charles Rosen had the first few rows of seats removed, employing dim lighting to simulate the illusion of one, with the conductor seated on an apple-box. To accommodate Brooks’ desire for a Busby Berkeley-esque overhead shot of dancers goose-stepping in swastika formation, the staircase built for an earlier part of the number had to be removed, with only its first few steps retained, pushed against the theater’s back wall and clearly visible from the overhead angle.

All of this lovable nonsense begins on a seemingly harmless premise: a failed producer, tired of striving to recapture his former glory, decides instead to soak his investors for far more cash than is necessary to put on his show. But just in case anyone gets suspicious, a show will be produced – an unmitigated disaster of such epic proportions, it will surely close on opening night, thus affording Bialystock the opportunity to hightail it to Brazil with the remainder of his ill-gotten gains and live comfortably for the rest of his days on someone else’s coin. Not a bad scheme, actually. Except that life never goes according to plan – particularly Bialystock’s – even under the most creatively disastrous of endeavors. Initially, Mel Brooks approached Joseph Levine and Embassy to fund his project. Levine agreed, but balked at Brooks wanting to call the film ‘Springtime for Hitler’. Together, they decided on the far more obsequious ‘The Producers’ – the play within the film retaining its Nazified lederhosen leitmotif. The Producers is about as down and dirty as movies get, with Brooks’ penchant for taking the lowest road available as a means to his high concept, resulting in some truly rambunctious idiocy. What makes the movie so funny is that all of its expulsion of crassness is deliberate – taking dead aim for the proverbial ‘kick in the crotch’ and never once missing the bull’s eye. Critics of the day didn’t quite get it and, regrettably, neither did whole portions of the audience. Few perceived the delicious double-entendre under its obvious tongue-in-cheek pro-Nazi humor as anything more scathingly original than anti-Semitic demagoguery, the slum prudery of all but a handful of the U.S. critics seemingly without any sense of what constitutes a good old-fashion satire – albeit, one taken to extremes. Yet, The Producers is a movie that, in many ways, brutally challenges society’s moral code, more so in 1968 than today, as our contemporary slant on pop culture is marked by defunct moral turpitude. In its absence The Producers plays much more like a sick little in-joke, defiantly stamped out in hip boots against a nearly forgotten or, at the very least misplaced sense of propriety the movie played off of in 1968. Nevertheless, The Producers holds up because it remains irreverently religious in its thoroughness to insult. Yet, the film never talks down to its audience, and this, I suspect, is the real reason it has endured beyond its years and itself, inspiring a hit Broadway revival and another movie based upon that ever so slightly tweaked and revised experience.

We begin with harried Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel), a physically repugnant Broadway has-been whose current claim to fame is seducing rich elderly widows. On his last play, Bialystock managed to sock away $2000 cash for his own private use, a minor fraud immediately detected by accountant, Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder). Bialystock sweats out being reported until Bloom makes the astute observation a producer could really make a killing if he ever decided to deliberately produce a flop instead of a hit – selling shares in the venture at a gross over-inflation of the production costs and thus pocketing the remainder of the money for private use. Since there’s never been an audit of a Broadway flop – presumably because there is no money to be had once the show’s premature closing has eaten up all the profits – Bloom wisely deduces the IRS would likely never discover the ruse.  Naturally, Bialystock is intrigued. After all, it would be just as easy to steal big as it has been to steal a little.  Sensing Bloom’s minor enthusiasm and playing off of his lackluster lifestyle – insisting he leads a fairly pointless and joyless existence – Bialystock convinces Bloom to partake in his naughty little plan. The boys will endeavor to produce the worst play Broadway has ever seen – so artistically void of any merit and done so resplendently as a gargantuan misfire, they will easily be able to close after one performance, taking all their oversold shares to Rio De Janeiro to live happily ever after. Bloom initially has faith in the plot, but begins to chicken out, and thereafter has to be repeatedly goaded to remain a silent partner.

After perusing hundreds of truly idiotic scripts, Bialystock and Bloom settle on the very bottom of the barrel: a bizarre musicalized love letter written in earnest by diehard Nazi whack-job, Franz Liebkind (Kenneth Mars). The play, ‘Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden’ is signed over to Bialystock and Bloom and assigned to Roger De Bris (Christopher Hewett), a hack so inept at directing anything, his projects ‘close on the first day of rehearsals’. Bialystock and Bloom’s stroke of fractured inspiration continues when they cast semi-lucid flower child, Lorenzo St. Dubois - ‘L.S.D’ for short…get it? - (Dick Shawn) as their star. In fact, L.S.D. didn’t even know the pair was casting a show. He merely stumbled into their theater during rehearsals. The plot turns even more severely rancid as the greedy Bialystock sells 25,000% interest in the show to his regular gaggle of investors (a perverse bunch of elderly widows; the most joyously naughty played by Estelle Winwood). After some weeks of preparation, the boys have their debut. The critics and audience are initially mortified by this buoyantly crass and grossly insensitive caricature wrapped in the trappings of a light musical comedy.  Everything is going according to plan. There’s a general electricity coursing through the packed house – suggesting that at any moment the audience will get up on masse from their seats and march out of the theater. But then a curious turn of events takes place. Suspecting the play to be a sublime counterculture charade, the patrons instead settle in and begin to laugh hysterically.

Stunned, Bialystock and Bloom turn on one another, their incessant lamenting interrupted by the arrival of a gun-toting Franz Liebkind who is outraged by what the pair has done to his masterwork. Doing some fast talking – that includes taking the ‘Siegfried Oath’ – Bialystock and Bloom agree to blow up the theater in order to stop the show. In the resultant deluge all three conspirators are injured, caught and put on trial. On the witness stand, Bloom lovingly refers to Bialystock as ‘the most selfish man I have ever met in my life’. The trio is, of course, convicted and sent to jail.  They immediately go back into producing plays with their fellow inmates; Bialystock and Bloom overselling shares to the rest of the inmates and even the warden. As part of the finale, the trio performs ‘Prisoners of Love’ as the credits begin to roll.

The Producers is derisively tacky - precisely what makes it such a rarity and a treat to behold. Mel Brooks isn’t trying to be taken seriously. In fact, his natural affinity for asininity is working overtime herein. The performances are spot on ‘over the top’ and the comedy imbued with such a vial streak of unabashed insolence it can only be taken at face value, to be embraced in all its offensive slurs as undiluted insanity with perhaps no equal before or since. After screening the rough cut, AVCO/Embassy balked to release the movie – a distribution stalemate narrowly averted when Peter Sellers took out a private ad in Variety, stressing a wider distribution deal. Comedy is one thing. Black comedy, quite another. Yet, The Producers plays very much like angry comedy. Its’ passionate embrace of the truly impertinent digresses into a more perverse subtext. The underlay of Brooks’ movie isn’t shock value per say – except superficially -, but rather to create the aura of an effrontery that points to just how shamelessly degenerate popular opinion can become – and pop culture ‘has’ become – when deliberately faced with a very unpopular subject. The Producers is not high art. Then again, this was never its intent. And, in achieving exactly its purpose, Mel Brooks takes this proverbial sow’s ear to new heights of shameless pleasure. It’s still a sow’s ear that we get – though, arguably, the one Brook’s intended us to appreciate all along.  Art comes in many forms. And, even if The Producers leaves a stain rather than its mark on the collective consciousness, that is exactly as it should be. This is one intentionally sick little joke, blown into the most gargantuan laugh track of its generation. Three cheers.

Given its controversial subject matter, The Producers’ failure to find its audience in 1968 seems an almost foregone conclusion. Indeed, the picture’s distributor, AVCO/Embassy thought so little of it they failed to preserve an original negative for their vaults. Despite earning an Oscar-nod for co-star, Gene Wilder (the only Best Actor nomination of his entire career), The Producers would go on the books as a colossal flop, acquiring its cult stats a decade later, after 16mm prints began to circulate on college campuses. In 2020, TCM began broadcasting a new 4K remaster of the movie, culled from archives inherited by StudioCanal with a StudioCanal animated logo replacing the original AVCO/Embassy title card, accompanied by a prologue that reads, “This movie has been restored from the original camera negative and a dupe positive in 4K 16 bits by StudioCanal with the technical support of Eclair.” Accordingly, image quality on Kino Lorber’s newly minted Blu-ray hails from this master, and, toggles between exceptional to good fidelity, depending on the source used. This is a definite improvement over Shout! Factory’s effort from 2013, re-framing the image in its proper 1:85.1 OAR. Kino’s remaster yields a far more impressive image with infinitely more accurate color reproduction. The Shout! leaned far too much to the warm end of the spectrum. Kino’s re-balanced color appears, if not perfect, then definitely more to the taste of vintage color from 1968. Flesh tones are vastly improved. Gone is the ruddy orange/red palette. Whites have been restored. On the Shout! disc they adopted a slightly bluish tint. Certain shots remain more softly focused, likely owing to limited archival materials and the use of less than perfect print masters several generations removed from the original camera negative. Two audio tracks, the original 2.0 DTS mono (preferred) and the 2013 upgrade to 5.1 DTS, which retains much of the strident qualities inherent in the original recordings, and apart from minor spatial separation, really offers nothing to advance the overall aural fidelity in these original tracks.  Kino has shelled out for a new commentary from filmmaker/historian, Michael Schlesinger – not terribly comprehensive, but worth a listen. Better still, the original ‘making of’, a hold-over from the old MGM/UA DVD, has been ported over. At just under 70-minutes, this one’s a distinct hoot, featuring vintage interviews with cast and crew, commenting on their participation. There’s also a Playhouse outtake, a sketch gallery, radio spots and theatrical trailer – plus, Paul Mazursky, reading Peter Sellers’ original plea to Joe Levine to give The Producers its theatrical due. Bottom line: The Producers is just one of those lavishly absurd, crassly commercial and thoroughly fun as hell comedies that prove insanity never goes out of fashion. Is it an exceptional picture? Let us suggest it remains a scathingly comical and highly original one, ripened into our current age of deviant pessimism. I enjoy it for its absurdity. Others might, in spite of it.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

3.5

VIDEO/AUDIO

4

EXTRAS

3