The Producers
If you have any interest at all in seeing ''The Producers," I urge you -- no, I beg you -- to see it in a movie theater, preferably at a packed, peak-traffic screening. Not so much a film as an awkwardly framed souvenir of the Broadway hit musical, ''The Producers" needs a live audience like a candle needs oxygen. Watch it at home, on DVD, and you'll hear crickets. See it in a roomful of strangers, and you'll all gladly cry uncle.
In 1968, Mel Brooks made a tatty little film farce about two Broadway producers (rampaging elephant Zero Mostel and neurasthenic bunny Gene Wilder) who staged the worst musical of all time to make off with their backers' money. Their show was called ''Springtime for Hitler" -- a bracing slap across a late-'60s culture still getting used to the idea of black comedy. In 2001, Brooks brought ''The Producers" to Broadway with all the musical-comedy stops pulled out and with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick installed in the driver's seat. Huge success and a pile of Tony Awards followed, and now comes this new big-screen iteration. Really, the thing has grown like fungus on a muggyday.
Susan Stroman directed the show on Broadway and what she has done here is photograph that show -- no more, no less. This is good news for anyone who couldn't afford a trip to New York and $100 tickets, but it's a fairly odd approach to cinema. Stroman keeps such musty bits of stage business as the mechanical pigeons (hasn't she heard of CGI?), and even the scenes shot in Central Park feel adorably chintzy, as though borrowed from one of the lesser MGM musicals of the 1950s. Otherwise, it's wide shots for the big production numbers, medium close-ups for the dialogue scenes, and that's all, folks.
The cast, meanwhile, is still playing to the third balcony. Nathan Lane's performance as Max Bialystock -- well, I wouldn't call it a performance, more like assault with a deadly ham -- lacks Mostel's brutish edge. Lane's a cuddly Max, equal parts baggypants comic and overgrown kid. Even his head is funny, like a pineapple gone the color of a cherry tomato.
As nebbishy Leo Bloom, Broderick has to play straight man to the film's collection of maniacs: Lane; Gary Beach as transvestite stage director Roger De Bris; Roger Bart as Carmen Ghia, De Bris's sibilant ''common-law assistant;" all those wealthy little old ladies Max has to shtup. Broderick's also a little old to still be playing the wide-eyed naif, and his strangled voice comes straight from Wilder's larynx. Brooks compensates by giving Leo a lovely old-school musical-revue number, ''I Wanna Be a Producer," dancing girls and all.
Conceding that there is, in fact, a culture outside of Broadway, the film brings in Uma Thurman as Ulla, the boys' secretary/leading actress/sexpot/muse, and Will Ferrell as Franz Liebkind, the dim-bulb Nazi pigeon fancier who has written ''Springtime for Hitler." Ferrell's fine -- his rendition of ''Der Guten Tag Hop-Clop" is a stitch both in the film and in its ''American Idol"-style reprise over the closing credits -- but Thurman's a revelation. Towering over her castmates like a giraffe over a tribe of pygmies, the ''Kill Bill" star plays dumb as only a smart woman can, and her singing and dancing are more than credible. Thurman puts me in mind of Cyd Charisse: same mile-long legs, less physical grace, better acting.
All of ''The Producers" leads up to the debut of the deadly show, of course, and truth to tell, it's a letdown. Using the Third Reich as the source of taboo-busting yuks was a novelty in 1968 -- it was so wrong it was right -- but there's something self-congratulatory about ''Springtime for Hitler" after all those Tonys, and that smugness raises the specter of genuine tastelessness. The culture has moved on, too. If Brooks had really wanted to shock audiences in 2005, why not ''Springtime for Terri Schiavo"? (Because it wouldn't get a laugh," that's why. ''South Park" aside, we're a crasser yet more timid society now, one in which the Holocaust is safe for comedy because it's 60 years in the past.)
But that's asking ''The Producers" to be part of the real world when it's a defiant celebration of 20th-century fakery: Broadway shows, movie musicals, old-time burlesque, the endless parodies that have tumbled out of Mel Brooks's brain over the years. That fraudulence, merry and unstoppable, wins an audience over in the end, well before the last delightful spritz of post-credits seltzer (stick around; there's a surprise cameo). The whole movie rings with the exultant mockery of Leo Bloom's cry, ''I'm not going into the toilet -- I'm going into showbiz!"
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