Critics reviews

Brooks would go on to make arguably better films – Young Frankenstein is slicker and more restrained; Blazing Saddles, wilder and more inventive – but The Producers is so effusively inappropriate and so damned funny it is one of the highest examples of low comedy.

Mel Brooks sets the template here for both overripe performances and lavishly overproduced musical numbers devoted to atrocities in many of his subsequent features. And in the final analysis, what may seem most charming about his primitive professionalism is what’s most unprofessional about it.

Even those unfamiliar with Mel Brooks’s stroke of genius will trace back to it via references, style and even a kind of humor that has permeated into popular culture.

There are tedious stretches in The Producers that rely on dumb-slut, druggie-hippie, and randy-queer jokes that were probably 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 The Great Dictator, and it's all the more effective for how little Brooks prepares you for it.

Mostel and Wilder (as his bumbling Portnovian accountant) ham outrageously, and some of the humour falls flat. But the all-time flop itself could serve as a definition of kitsch, its centrepiece being the number 'Springtime for Hitler', all tits, pretzels and beer steins, in the best tradition of gaudy American burlesque.

Max is one of the funniest toxic characters ever put on screen—we’re constantly confronted with his angling, hustling, and demeaning behavior to others, yet we’re with him for the long haul, and happily.

There are terrible librettos and then there's Mein Kampf, Mel Brooks at his most gleeful puts on the spectacle it deserves... Strutting evil is sent up with a steamroller and representational pop gets its own shpritz in the eye, the performers take turns playing hammer to the camera's anvil—Mostel hurtles through like a circus bear with a Stradivarius, Wilder is dubbed "Prince Myshkin" and rises magnificently to the challenge, damp security blanket in hand.

There is so much to laugh at in this film - from sight gags to clever scripting - that it bears repeated viewings and may well find its way into your collection of post-pub favourites.

Watching The Producers, the Birth Of A Nation of tasteless comedy, is a little like listening to a James Brown or Parliament album from which each song has been sampled a dozen times: Every aspect has been strip-mined or stolen, but that hasn't detracted from the original's freshness and vitality.

Like all of Brooks' films, the comedy works through cleverness, stupidity and audacity.

Brooks's magnum opus is still a ferocious gale of bulldozing Jewish mockery, dominated by Zero Mostel's comb-over juggernaut. However familiar, it delivers like a shorted slot machine; memories of the tame and safely distant stage version will evaporate in the runway turbulence of Mostel's spittle-spray-in-your-eye performance. In fact, the more time passes the more combustible Brooks's burlesque of Nazism and the post-war remnants of old-school Jewish showbiz seems.

The movie was like a bomb going off inside the audience's sense of propriety. There is such rapacity in its heroes, such gleeful fraud, such greed, such lust, such a willingness to compromise every principle, that we cave in and go along.