Posted 7:33 PM by Gene

IT GETS BETTER:

Here's some grim news, especially if Mel Brooks holds a place in your personal ethos of funny and a mediocre movie musical is like a stake through your heart. "The Producers" on screen, as a musical, does not work. It is not very funny. It doesn't look right. It's depressing.

IT GETS BETTER:

'Producers' have a flop on their hands
Mel Brooks may have finally hit upon a way to lose money with "Springtime for Hitler."

OR:

As creaky as the traditional musicals it once poked fun at, "The Producers" has been entombed — lox, shtick and two smoking bagels — as a theatrical fossil, and reinforces the danger in returning to the same material one time too many.

IT GETS BETTER:

EVEN A. O. DOESN'T LIKE IT!

[H]ow come the movie feels, in every sense, like a rip-off? Nobody expects the jokes to be fresh or the songs to be any good. Some of the big laugh lines have been provoking groans since the first, nonmusical "Producers" movie way back in 1968, and probably even longer, since even that film was a fond, nostalgic embrace of a dying show business tradition. And no one - probably not even Mr. Brooks himself - would suggest that he belongs in the pantheon of American theatrical composers. ("I'm gonna put on shows that will enthrall 'em/ Read my name in Winchell's column"? It ain't Rodgers and Hammerstein. It ain't even M. C. Hammer.) So it may take a faithful rendering on-screen to reveal the real essence of "The Producers" in its musical incarnation - its vulgarity, its cynicism, its utter lack of taste, charm or wit.

I think we have a HIT on our hands!

P. S. I must confess I almost feel sorry for Kerngershwin: ad-blurbists lifted him to the skies, and now ad-blurbists are plunging him to where Beelzebub lurks. One wonders if this whole rotten spectacle would have happened if the blurbists hadn't been writing for their vanity. Consider this graf from the fool Jack Mathews:

I don't know if there's ever been a more awe-inspiring moment in theater than the "Springtime for Hitler" number in the play, when a mirrored ceiling tilts down and exposes the swastika created below - Busby Berkeley-like - by the dancing storm troopers.

Why does the thought of this scene not drive me to the hysterics the infernal flack John Heilpern had when he raved the masterpiece for the late Talk Magazine -- run by the WHINER BROTHERS, chief backers of the show? Having dancers doing a swastika formation -- and if that isn't obvious enough, having elaborate stage machinery demonstrate they're doing a swastika formation -- suggests the Pelion of unfunny piling on Ossa. An earlier, more discriminating theater crowd would have greeted it with boos and rotten eggs. THE GREATEST MUSICAL OF ALL TIME was just a fad like hula-hoops, a mania like tulip bulbs; but where those fads and mania were harmless, this one exposes the rot in our culture, as this show thoroughly depended upon unearned adulation, was the plaything of a small, self-centered, hermetic coterie of snobs, and proved again that in show-biz excellence is the flimsiest of constructs.

In short, this is one of the most overrated vehicles in all show-business history. And this is why I get no little satisfaction from these reviews -- a rueful satisfaction.