The Producers (1967)
1.85:1
Dolby Digital 5.1
MGM Home Entertainment, $24.98

In 1967, The Producers opened in a Philadelphia movie theater occupied by one bag lady and two grim-faced producers. Counting writer-director Mel Brooks and his companions, the audience totaled seven people, and when it was all over Brooks spent a long drive back to New York wondering if he should go back to drumming.

He needn’t have worried. A few months later, actor Peter Sellers saw a private screening of The Producers in Los Angeles – on a full stomach of marijuana-laced brownies – and then awakened the film’s producer, Joe Levine, at 3 a.m. to urge him to get behind the picture. The next day, Sellers declared the film a work of genius in a full-page ad in Variety. Boosted by Sellers’ plug, the crude, immature and hysterically funny film caught on with the public, and it eventually earned Brooks a Best Screenplay Oscar.

The Producers tells the story of Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel), a theatrical producer who finances his shows by seducing elderly women and milking them for "investment" checks. He teams up with Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder), a neurotic mess of an accountant who stumbles onto the idea that they can make more money with a flop than they can with a hit by selling 25,000-percent ownership of a show. How to stage a sure-fire failure? Make a musical about the Third Reich called Springtime for Hitler. Despite hiring an absurdly pretentious director and over-the-top actors, the producers create a hit, which leads to the collapse of their scheme. Convicted of fraud, the irrepressible Max ends up in jail leading a group of convicts through a musical romp titled Prisoner of Love.

This DVD offers a digitally remastered presentation of the film exactly the way Brooks conceived it: as a tightly structured succession of comedic set pieces culminating in the preposterous "Springtime for Hitler" musical number. Cinematographer Joe Coffey’s contribution is serviceable – this appears to be his first and last credit as director of photography – and the film has a few inventive visual flourishes, including a Busby Berkeley-style overhead shot depicting a troupe of dancers slowly rotating in the shape of a swastika. But the film merits repeat viewings mainly for the opportunity to savor its rat-a-tat comic rhythms, inspired physical shtick and ingenious casting.

The centerpiece of this disc is an hour-long "making of" documentary focusing on Brooks and his quirky collaborators. The featurette juxtaposes script pages and scenes from the film with interviews. Brooks, a natural racounteur, recounts how hard it was getting the project off the ground. He initially called the movie Springtime for Hitler, and one studio he pitched it to suggested he tone down the satire and change the title to Springtime for Mussolini. In other interviews, Lee Meredith, who played Bialystock’s gorgeous Scandinavian secretary Ulla, shows off her still-energetic chops as a go-go dancer, while production designer Charles Rosen remembers crafting scenery that would adhere to Brooks’ comic dictum that "Yellow is a funny color."

Sadly, missing in action is the film’s blustering heart and soul, Mostel. He died in 1977 but the stories live on. Upon meeting Wilder for the first time, Mostel took the actor’s hand, pulled him into a deep embrace and kissed him on the lips. "All my tensions flew out the window," Wilder recalls. "We sat down at the table and read a scene, and I was good because I wasn’t nervous anymore."

The Producers did make some viewers nervous and others angry. "Some Jewish groups were outraged," Brooks recalls. "They didn’t get the joke. The way to deal with people like that is to laugh them into oblivion."

– Hugh Hart