Susan Stroman (2005)

This adaptation of Mel Brooks’s smash-hit stage musical – itself adapted from his 1968 picture – seemed to come and go quickly, without much attention.  Why?  The original film is widely regarded as a classic sick-joke comedy and its highlight is a big stage musical number so a screen musical remake might seem superfluous.  The stage show, which ran on Broadway from 2001 to 2004, was still on in the West End (where it opened in late 2004) when the film adaptation was released.   The material was always a satire of Broadway and it’s more thoroughly one in the stage musical version (thanks to most of the numbers); one dimension of the satire is lost if the audience isn’t actually sitting in a theatre, where they’re, in effect, part of the joke.    Perhaps the film, for all the prodigious energy of Nathan Lane in particular, isn’t technically frenetic enough for a decade in which the most admired screen musicals have been the hyper-edited Moulin Rouge! and Chicago.  Compared with these, The Producers looks relatively old-fashioned, although it’s a relief as well as a pleasure to see numbers performed uninterruptedly instead of being killed in the editing suite (death by a thousand cuts).  It’s hard to decide which, if any, of these factors were behind the film’s muted reception.  Whatever the explanation, I think this version of The Producers has been relatively overlooked.  It’s a very enjoyable and effective screen comedy musical (and much better than either Moulin Rouge! or Chicago).

Most of the main contributors to the original Broadway production are reunited here – except that two marquee names (Uma Thurman and Will Ferrell) replace the actors from the stage show.   As on Broadway, Susan Stroman did the choreography as well as directing.   Stroman doesn’t appear to have rethought the production for the screen beyond what was necessary but this is one instance where I think that was the right decision.  The fact that most of the performances are scaled for a theatre not only strengthens the film as a record of an outstandingly successful stage show.  It also – because the people we’re watching on screen seem to be creatures of the theatre through and through – sharpens our awareness that The Producers is essentially about putting on a show and the varieties of pretence and fakery associated with that.  This element is reinforced by the mystery of when the film is set.  At one moment, the two main characters are walking in Central Park and a nurse pushing a pram, from the first half of the twentieth century, passes through the shot.  Not much later, there are Village People look-alikes among the gay retinue at the home of Roger De Bris, the prospective director of ‘Springtime for Hitler’.  It all goes to show that Broadway is a state of mind rather than a place in time.

Nathan Lane (who looks a cross between David Jason and Paul Gascoigne) is a legendary Broadway performer.  His cinema credits are relatively few (apart from The Producers, he’s probably best known for doing voices in animated films like The Lion King and Stuart Little).  Since I may not ever see Lane on stage, I’m really grateful not just to have seen him on screen in The Producers but also to have been given, in effect, a record of his stage performance as the notoriously unsuccessful Broadway producer, Max Bialystock.   As he demonstrated again this year in Then She Found Me, Matthew Broderick is a brilliant comic actor; his performance as Leopold Bloom, the anxious accountant who becomes Bialystock’s sidekick in the ‘Springtime for Hitler’ project, is wonderfully well judged.  In terms of performance level, Broderick is – in relation to the indefatigable comic zest of Lane – prepared to play straight man most of the time.  The fact that Broderick’s Leo is so unconcealably neurotic means that he becomes a very funny straight man indeed.   In his scenes with Uma Thurman – as the Bialystock-Bloom team’s blonde bombshell secretary-receptionist-leading-lady Ulla Inga Hansen Benson Yansen Tallen Hallen Svaden Swanson (that’s her first name) – Broderick develops Bloom’s unprepossessing qualities into a winning romantic style.  The 1968 film got plenty of comic mileage out of the physical contrast between the avid bulk of Zero Mostel as Bialystock and the neurasthenic skinniness of Gene Wilder as Bloom.  Lane is a good deal heavier than Broderick but there’s not much height difference between them, which gives them an amusing look of partnership.

Uma Thurman performs Ulla’s audition number (‘If You’ve Got It, Flaunt It’) spectacularly;  she’s really likeable in the role because she’s prepared to make her ravishing beauty part of the comedy (she looks Nordically super-healthy as well as very lovely).   In his first scenes as Franz Liebkind, the Nazi author of ‘Springtime for Hitler’, Will Ferrell is straining slightly to be as deeply mad as he needs to be.  He more than delivers in the sequence in which he interrupts the auditions for the Hitler role and storms to the stage to demonstrate how ‘Haben Sie gehört das deutsche Band?’ should really be sung (that is, in Broadway showstopping style).   Gary Beach is marvellous as the ‘the worst director in town’, Roger De Bris.   In the privacy of his own mansion, Roger is not merely a transvestite but palpably fulfilled when he’s wearing a gorgeous gown.    Roger Bart is Carmen Ghia, Roger’s hissingly bitchy ‘assistant’.   Bialystock’s retinue of geriatric angels, on whom he bestows sexual favours in exchange for continued financial support for his productions (and who supply a chorus on zimmer frames for ‘Along Came Bialy’), is headed by Eileen Essell as Hold Me-Touch Me.

The Producers takes some time to warm up.  The early numbers lack parodistic edge so that the first half hour of the film has a puzzlingly gentle, almost wholesome quality.   But from ‘Keep It Gay’ (which ends in a conga in Roger’s mansion) onwards, the verve and wit of the songs (by Brooks and Thomas Meehan) pick up – to such an extent that, by the time of opening night, I was beginning to wonder whether ‘Springtime of Hitler’ itself might be upstaged.   In the event, it isn’t at all (John Barrowman, as a blond tenor stormtrooper, is a surprisingly strong contributor to the success of the number) – and is followed by ‘Heil Myself’, a magnificent parody (sung by Gary Beach as Hitler) of a Broadway I-was-nobody-but-now-I’m-somebody hymn of self-affirmation.   (Susan Stroman, it must be said, goes too far at this point in not cutting away from the numbers.  She omits Bialystock’s and Bloom’s dawning realisation that ‘Springtime for Hitler’ is not going to be the flop they were counting on it to be to make their fortune.)    As a film writer and director, Mel Brooks was often better as a gag man than at constructing stories or character.  The essential plot idea of The Producers was such a great one that it hardly seems to matter what happens once ‘Springtime for Hitler’ proves a hit – but my impression was that the plot was worked out more fully and satisfyingly here than in the original film.    The names of other Bialystock productions that appear on the screen are all trademark Brooks.  The flop before ‘Springtime’ is ‘Funny Boy’, a musical adaptation of Hamlet.  There’s a poster for ‘King Leer’ in Bialystock’s office.  At the end, we’re told that ‘Springtime’ was the forerunner of many other Bialystock and Bloom smashes, including ‘A Streetcar Named Morris’, ‘Katz’, ‘Maim’ and ‘Death of a Salesman on Ice’.

30 December 2008