'THE PRODUCERS' Delivers 'HEIL HITLER' Roar

'Don't be stupid, be a smarty / Come & join the Nazi Party'

Review by Brian Bamford

I STRUGGLED to contain myself from waving a 'Heil Hitler' salute at this superb performance of THE PRODUCERS at Manchester's  Royal Exchange.  When the flighty dame Ulla does the floor show with 'When You've Got It,, Flaunt It', it's a randy Max Bialystock who declares:  .'We may both be seated but you've two standing ovations down here'.

It's now over 50 years since THE PRODUCERS was first released as a film in 1967.  It had mixed reviews with the New York Times reviewer Renata Adler saying:  'Some of it is shoddy and gross and cruel; the rest is funny in an unexpected way.'

It took off only when Peter Sellers, who loved the film. took out and paid for full-page adverts in trade magazines such as Variety, insisting it was the 'ultimate film...the essence of all great comedy combined in a single motion picture'.

In 1996, the film was selected for preservation as part of the US National Film Registry in recognition of the fact that it was 'culturally, historically or aesthetically significant'.

Anti-Heroes from Falstaff to Hitler

Leo Bloom is an accountant sent to do the books for Max Bialystock, a failing Broadway producer, and finds that Bialystock raised $2,000 more than he lost on his last failure. You could make a lot of money by overfinancing turkeys, he muses, a glint in his eye:  'The IRS isn't interested in flops.'

In 2000, the critic Roger Ebert described the film thus: '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.'

It has been argued somewhere that Shakespeare didn't want Falstaff to become such a popular hero as he did in his play Henry IV, part I and II.  Raz Shaw, the director of the Royal Exchange play, argues that Mel Brooks was a second-generation New York jew who in the musical only wanted to mock the Nazis:
'The only people it really bullseyes into ridicule is the Nazis.  Everyone else, it likes.  It tries to glory in difference.'

'Springtime for Hitler'

Their formula for failure is a musical named 'Springtime for Hitler', with a dance line of jackbooted SS girls and lyrics like, 'Don't be stupid, be a smarty! Come and join the Nazi Party!'  Their neo-Nazi playwright Franz Liebkind roars up to the opening night on a motorcycle, wears a Nazi helmet into the lobby, and tells them, 'It's magic time!'

Is Raz Shaw right to claim that the only people it ridicules 'is the Nazis' or to imply the doesn't have other targets?  After all Mel Brooks who wrote the play, told Susan Stamberg of NPR News:  'The comedy writer is like the conscience of the king.  He's got to tell them the truth, and that's my job-to make terrible things entertaining.'

Vitally Vulgar & Politically Incorrect

My partner who came to see the play at the Royal Exchange said 'It is just so politically incorrect!' 
Indeed it is, just as when somebody farts in Church; for 'The Producers' is cheerfully willing to go anywhere for a laugh.  Or as Mel Brooks responded to a woman who had said 'I have to tell you, Mr. Brooks, that your movie is vulgar':  'Lady' he said, 'it rose below vulgarity.'

And yet is Brooks right when he further tells Susan Stamberg:  'The way to deal with despots like Hitler is not to get on a soapbox and fight (then) with rhetoric, but fight them with ridicule, to laugh at them-laugh them into olbivion.'

I think we've got to grasp that even now, no especially now, that popularism, nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what some would regard as sensible politics.  As George Orwell remarked in his essay entitled 'Wells, Hitler and the World State':  'Creatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching into the present, and if they are ghosts they are at any rate ghosts which need a strong magic to lay them.' 

Sometimes ridicule may not be enough despite the seduction of the current Royal Exchange production of 'The Producers' and all the wit and cleverness of Mel Brooks.

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