Writer-director Mel Brooks’s The Producers is a farce powered by a simple narrative engine. Faded Broadway producer Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) and a frustrated, nearly infantile accountant named Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder) conspire to stage the worst play in the world so that they can pocket the financiers’ money and jet off somewhere to shed their nickel-and-dime troubles. As Bialystock sees it, this is a no-brainer, as he’s been staging flops for years, only this time he’ll actually get paid for it and be effectively liberated from a life of hustling sad women who are old enough to be his mother. All Bialystock has to do, Bloom tells him, is to sell considerably more stock in the play than available, produce a horrendous flop at a 10th the advertised budget that’s bound to close opening night, and the accountant will properly conceal the financial discrepancies. Needless to say, Bialystock and Bloom inadvertently produce a Broadway smash.
There’s a great irony to the premise that’s rooted in Jewish-American humor, and that’s specifically revealing of Brooks’s beginnings as a comic on the Borscht Belt. Bialystock and Bloom are so cynical and disenfranchised that they immediately rule out the possibility of success, a suspicion that’s ironically confirmed by their inability to even adequately achieve failure. Contemporary audiences only familiar with the phenomenally successful Broadway adaptation may be surprised by the film’s casually smirking hopelessness, as The Producers is charged with a tension that would govern most other subsequent Brooks films.
It may sound odd to express such a sentiment when discussing an obvious legend, but I’ve never been able to shake the suspicion that Brooks was capable of making better movies, excluding his masterpieces, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. His films are often split between an overwhelmingly needy urge to shower the audience with “bits” and the desire to mine darker and more personal and political terrain. With The Producers, Brooks keeps threatening to veer off into a naked parable of how commercial impulses affect art for both the good and the bad, but he keeps pulling himself back to the over-written zingers that the actors have been tasked with delivering with jolting, nagging loudness.
There are tedious stretches in The Producers that rely on jokes that were probably starting to feel dated in 1968. But there are also moments in the film that operate on a level of shockingly blunt political satire. The “Springtime for Hitler” number is a justifiably classic scene in American cinema, as angry and daring as anything in Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, and it’s all the more effective for how little Brooks prepares you for it; a contemporary audience member may suddenly feel as if they’ve flipped the channel from a rerun of Your Show of Shows to one of the darkest moments in Bob Fosse’s Cabaret.
The film’s inconsistencies ultimately flatter it. The Producers is propelled by Brooks’s unruly comic energy, which is also skillfully expressed by his cast, particularly Mostel, whose character’s demented avariciousness recalls W.C. Fields. The film also has a subtext that renders it eerily prescient: Bialystock and Bloom’s scheme fails because they over-shoot, staging a play so horrendously ludicrous that it’s interpreted as a farce, thus inadvertently redeeming their intended schlock. That’s a plot development that anticipates the exhaustingly self-ware postmodern impulse that has come to define American pop culture, threatening to level the playing ground for all art as brief interchangeable amusements consumed at random.
Image/Sound
For this release, Kino Lorber has sourced a new 4K restoration, resulting in what’s easily the best-looking transfer that The Producers has ever received on home video. The color balancing is consistently impressive—for proof, one need only glimpse the eye-popping reds and blues in Zero Mostel and Estelle Winwood’s costumes in the opening scene—and the image is sharp and rich in detail throughout. Skin tones, which have looked pasty in earlier releases of the film, are more naturalistic here, while the grain is healthy and evenly distributed. On the audio front, there are two 16-bit tracks available on the disc, and while neither is quite as robust as the ones available on the 2013 Shout! Factory release, they’re nothing to sneeze at, as they boast clean dialogue and bring a nice depth to the film’s songs.
Extras
The most significant new extra here is the commentary track with filmmaker and historian Michael Schlesinger. Surprisingly, this is the first commentary ever included on a release of The Producers and Schlesinger comprehensively covers the history of the film’s making and the backgrounds of almost all the key actors. His love and appreciation of all things Mel Brooks comes through, but he keeps things light and brisk without resorting to fawning. The hour-long “The Making of The Producers,” which has long been a staple on home-video releases of the film, is also included here, along with a few outtakes from the playhouse-bombing scene, a sketch gallery, a handful of trailers, and a 45-second clip of filmmaker Paul Mazursky reading aloud Peter Sellers’s appreciation of the film upon first seeing the film.
Overall
The Producers finally gets a long-overdue commentary track and a sparkling new 4K transfer that blows previous home-video editions out of the water.
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