By Lee Pfeiffer
Shout! Factory's mutual love affair with Mel Brooks continues unabated with the company's Blu-ray release of the special edition DVD of The Producers. (The combo pak also includes a DVD version of the film.) On the assumption that readers have not been living on the moon for the last few decades, we won't belabor the in-depth specifics of the plot. Suffice it to say that Zero Mostel created a truly immortal screen character with his interpretation of Max Bialystock, a once formidable Broadway show producer who has fallen on hard times and has been relegated to bedding rich old woman in order to eek out survival in the urban jungle of Manhattan. Through an inadvertent idea posed to him by meek accountant Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder), Max devises an ingenious scheme to make a fortune by doing what he now does best: producing a show that is destined for financial failure. He'll over-sell majority shares of profits in a show to a wide number of gullible investors, none of whom will have to be paid providing that the show is a guaranteed failure. The show Max and his reluctant partner decide upon is titled Springtime for Hitler, a musical tribute to you-know-who written by a psychotic ex-Nazi (Kenneth Mars) who fancies himself a playwright. Although Max and Leo carry out their scheme perfectly by ensuring the show is spectacularly miscast with a brain-dead hippie (Dick Shawn) portraying Hitler, things go awry when pretentious audience members presume they are watching a brilliant satire against National Socialism.
If you're a retro movie lover, you don't have to be told about the many virtues of the film. Suffice to say that the performances are among the best loved in screen history and the humor has a timeless quality that will probably still seem relevant and contemporary decades from now. The sheer tastelessness of the premise, however, would virtually never find financial backing in today's motion picture industry, which is largely concentrated on producing mega-budget action productions. It should be mentioned how brilliantly John Morris' musical score and numbers hold up. Probably any real retro film fan can sing Springtime for Hitler verbatim.
The special edition is loaded with terrific extras including Laurent Bouzereau's excellent 2002 "making of" documentary that includes interviews with the surviving principals and key crew members, some of whom have sadly passed on in the intervening years. There is also a new featurette culled from another Shout! Brooks tribute set in which the writer/director discusses the uphill battle he had to bring to the film to the screen. He obtained financial backing from the legendary producer Joseph E. Levine, who was reluctant to let Brooks direct, as he had no experience doing so previously. Having won that battle, Levine forced Brooks to change the title of the film from Springtime for Hitler to The Producers because he feared audiences would think it was a story about the romance between Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun! Brooks also relates how Levine shelved the film for over a year following a poorly attended sneak preview in a New Jersey theater. A couple of fascinating anecdotes involve the fact that Brooks had cast Dustin Hoffman as Leo Bloom but Hoffman begged out of the production at the last minute so he could make The Graduate, which ironically starred Brooks' wife Anne Bancroft. Director Paul Mazursky relates how the film was rescued from oblivion after Peter Sellers ended up seeing it. Sellers took out a full page ad in Variety extolling the values of the movie and pleading for it to receive a theatrical release. The Blu-ray also contains a deleted scene that shows how Brooks originally filmed the destruction of the theater in the film's climax. While it's interesting to view it from a historical perspective, it goes on far too long and is much less effective than the version used in the final cut. There is also the original theatrical trailer and two promotional spots for other Shout! Brooks releases ass well as an extensive selection of original production design sketches.
The film's transfer to Blu-ray is a feast for the eyes.
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(For exclusive interview with Mel Brooks, see Cinema Retro issue #26)