The Producers - Palm Beach Post movie review

'The Producers' produces another hit

By HAP ERSTEIN
Palm Beach Post

They say that when you transfer a performance from the stage to the screen you are supposed to bring it down in size. It is a good thing nobody told Nathan Lane.

For there he is in the new movie of The Producers — the movie musical of the Broadway show of the Oscar-winning 1968 movie — as larger-than-life Max Bialystock, cavorting broadly with more than a little resemblance to Zero Mostel, who originated the role of the conniving theatrical producer in search of a sure-fire flop show.

Universal Pictures

'The Producers'

A-

The verdict: An extremely faithful transfer of the Broadway show to film, with a bravura performance by Nathan Lane.

Director: Susan Stroman
Starring: Will Ferrell, Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, Uma Thurman, Gary Beach
Run time: 134 minutes
Release date: Dec. 16, 2005
Rating: PG-13 for sexual humor and references.
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Lane seizes the movie by its throat and all but pummels us in the pursuit of laughs. Lane has had his modest successes on film (Mouse Hunt, The Birdcage), but this theater luminary at last has a major opportunity to show his farce skills, and he scores a personal triumph here.

Those not familiar with The Producers should be forewarned. Its humor is unapologetically crass and wildly politically incorrect. The take-no-prisoners comic style of Mel Brooks (and his co-writer Thomas Meehan) makes fun of gays, old people and Nazis, but foremost, it is a valentine to the theater, and its cherished eccentricities and dubious business practices.

This movie version of the record-breaking, 12-time Tony Award winner makes no excuses for being a musical. Where Chicago twisted itself into knots with concepts of production numbers taking place in characters' heads, The Producers is quaintly old-fashioned in its embrace of the traditions of Busby Berkeley and the cinematic flair of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.

Susan Stroman graduates from the stage version of The Producers to make her screen directing debut. Her philosophy is clearly "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Not only does she not open up the story for the camera, preferring to stick to the sublime artifice of sound stages, she shoots much of the film straight on, as if we each had a center orchestra seat. Stroman has brought with her most of the original Broadway cast and contents herself with essentially recording the show on film.

This is all good news for Producers fans. Those who do not care for musicals probably will not have their minds changed by this show, which, while hipper than most, still staunchly embraces the conventions of musical comedy.

The showbiz plot exploits a creative accounting loophole that Bialystock's bookkeeper Leo Bloom (a meek, yet exaggerated Matthew Broderick) poses, that a producer could make more money with a flop than with a hit, as long at it were a true disaster guaranteed to close on opening night. The two of them find it in a pro-Fuehrer musical, Springtime for Hitler, written by a former Nazi (Will Ferrell) still rooting for the Third Reich to rise again. They then assure its failure by hiring a clueless director (Gary Beach) and a cast that includes a curvaceous, but talent-challenged Swedish pastry named Ulla (Uma Thurman).

The movie's initial musical number, Opening Night, feels awfully stiff, but the score and the movie hit their stride with Leo's fantasy yearning, I Wanna Be A Producer, with showgirls tapping their way out of his office filing cabinets.

Everything from the show has been enlarged a little, like the gaggle of little-old-lady investors being wooed by Bialystock, who kick up their heels and click their walkers in New York's Central Park.

The title number from the show-within-the-movie is lifted directly from the stage musical and is hilarious in its tasteless spectacle. It is topped minutes later by Betrayed, Lane's tour de force recap of the entire movie from his jail cell.

And stick around for the credits, over which Lane and Broderick sing a new number, There's Nothing Like a Show on Broadway, a blatant push for an Oscar nomination for best original song that would bring a tear to Bialystock's eye. It is followed by a couple of other bonus bits, including an on-screen appearance by Brooks that is not to be missed. Just like the movie itself.