The Producers
1968
***
Director: Mel Brooks
Cast: Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder, Kenneth Mars, Lee Meredith, Estelle Winwood, Christopher Hewett, Dick Shawn, Renée Taylor, Andreas Voutsinas, Bill Macy
An unscrupulous Broadway producer and his accountant plan to finance their new musical with a Ponzi scheme, make sure that the show flops, and make off with the excess money. They find a script for a Nazi musical called Springtime for Hitler, but there's no accounting for bad taste. Mel Brooks stays behind the camera in his directorial debut, but he won an Academy Award for his screenplay. Unfortunately the performances by Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder, and Kenneth Mars are so loud, shrill, and over-the-top, that it's sometimes easy to forget that this is a clever and wonderfully nasty comedy with enjoyable song and dance numbers. The film was turned into a Broadway musical in 2001, which was then remade as a film in 2005.
