Several decades back, when I was drumming for dollars and scrounging for scratch around New York, I played a gig for elderly revelers in Yorkville, Manhattan's German-heavy enclave. When the bandleader told me to sustain a drum roll under some tune I didn't recognize, everyone arose in solemn respect, hands over hearts. Later I discovered why:
Adolf Hitler's birthday. ... Hey, when offensiveness leaps to absurdity, gimme a heil-five and go with it, Shotzie! That's what The Producers taught me. And I'm a sucker for a flouncy Der Fuhrer in a well-timed turn-turn-kick-turn.
When a movie about staging a Broadway musical becomes a Broadway musical about staging a Broadway musical that becomes a movie musical about staging a Broadway musical (breathe ...), how can it not be a self-aware wink and nod to itself? Mel Brooks' Tony record-buster is so self-satisfied that it more or less refuses to step offstage for its celluloid transformation, with director (and cinematic neophyte) Susan Stroman delivering a movie that largely looks like it was filmed from a front-row camera during a matinee. But not all plays must knuckle under to Hollywood's demand to "open up" on screen. This one forces film to capture the crackling electricity of the Broadway experience—the leather-lunged cast plays to the balcony with mad glee—with enough concessions to cinematic necessity. It works just dandy.
The Producers unabashedly embraces its staginess (it's a movie about Broadway, after all), Manhattan location shots spliced into candy-colored backgrounds of a fantasy New York (even fake scenery breezing by in a cab ride) that recall earnest '50s/'60s Gothamite predecessors such as Guys & Dolls and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, yet it's as knowingly self-satirizing as Brooks' Blazing Saddles.
The Producers is a postmodern throwback—a kiss (with a lotta tongue) to those musicals of yore crossed with Brooks' shameless over-the-toppery. It's both send-up and celebration of the "Broad" way, a bust-your-balls-for-a-laugh blast, and you either fall in with that, or fall out of the ticket line. (In the old vaudevillian bus analogy, if one gag's a groaner, hang on, another's coming right behind it.) Slicing about 10 minutes, however, would've lessened the movie's transparent strain to climax at the manic level it sets for itself.
You don't know the story? Once upon a time (or 1959), Nathan Lane's broken-down Broadway producer, Max Bialystock, is inspired by Matthew Broderick's meek accountant, Leo Bloom, who innocently observes that Max could clean up if he produced a surefire flop while raising more money than he needs from investors—the blue-haired old buzzards he shtups and fleeces. After Max wheedles the reluctant Bloom into the plot, they find the most tasteless play ever written (Springtime for Hitler, authored by Will Ferrell's nutty Nazi, Franz Liebkind), the most talentless director (Gary Beach's flaming queen, Roger DeBris) and hope for the worst.
If Lane and Broderick's combined comic voraciousness doesn't quite equal the swallow-the-scenery-and-belch buffet of Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder in 1968's classic, the Broadway babies still make a hearty meal of it. Lane, a world-class mugger, romps through the film like a little Borscht-Belt Tasmanian devil, sweat and spittle practically spritzing off the screen. Broderick is pitched a tad too tight, stiff and bug-eyed, even for the ready-to-unravel Leo, but his boyish appeal never abandons him, and he's a charming song-and-dance man, especially partnered with Uma Thurman's screwball Swedish siren, Ulla, on the sweet, old-fashioned tapper, "That Face."
The film lumbers initially as neurotic Leo and madcap Max meet and slowly freak at each other's idiosyncrasies, eventually teaming for theatrical larceny. Then this comic tornado gathers speed and goes airborne into lunacy. Layering a fantasy element over the original concept is the jaunty score with some stick-in-the-brain numbers ("We Can Do It," "I Wanna Be a Producer," Lane leading a chorus line of old biddies with walkers through Central Park, and his bravura "Betrayed," furiously recapping the plot in song).
While lacking the precise comic chops that made Kenneth Mars so dead-on hilarious as the original's pigeon-keeping facist loon, Ferrell still delivers on a broader level, especially strutting onstage during the Hitler auditions to a goofy-suave German ditty. Thurman, a long way from Kill Bill, is one game gal, carrying off her duties as a dancing ditz with admirable enthusiasm, if not absolute polish. Beach's DeBris and Roger Bart's "common-law assistant," Carmen Ghia, are outlandishly funny as gay men who make "yes" sound like steam escaping. The high-spirited "Keep it Gay" number lampoons sexual stereotypes while also outwitting the P.C. police by acknowledging the obvious: Musical theater is a stronghold for homosexual men ... and so what?
Truth is liberating, outrageousness is invigorating, and The Producers is as nuanced as Al Jolson on his knees belting out "Swanee." Simply substitute "Springtime for Hitler and Germany / Goose-step's the new step today."