The Producers

In October we will be celebrating the 100th birthday of one of the funniest filmmakers to have ever graced Hollywood: Mel Brooks. The man who tried to make bad taste a metaphor for his work was also instrumental in helping David Lynch prosper in film business thanks to producing his "Elephant Man" that got 8 Oscar nominations and gave Lynch plenty of benefit-of-the-doubt to do his own thing. 

Mel Brooks’s first feature film "The Producers" has become the stuff of legend, spawning not only a successful Broadway musical – which itself became a film – but also an entire season of "Curb Your Enthusiasm". It’s basically a theatrical in-joke – two Broadway impresarios put on the worst musical ever produced in order to hoodwink the shareholder but are surprised to find that their sure-fire flop becomes a hit. But it’s done with such immense love for its setting and its characters, the extravagant Max Bialystock played by the reliably oversized Zero Mostel, and Leo Bloom, portrayed by the then little-known Gene Wilder, that it seems universal.

It set Brooks off on a path which soon became a series of trademarks – broad comic caricatures, ethnic Jewish humour, gags piling up in struggling heaps and, most of all, a level of tastelessness which almost becomes its own art form. Here we have the first great Brooks bad-taste joke – the production number ‘Springtime for Hitler’ – and many people still consider it his best, an example of what Brooks once called “good bad taste”.

“The movie was like a bomb going off inside the audience’s sense of propriety.” Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times