Watch the movie from 1967 and it’s like a roller derby for oversize produce. The actors’ features bulge, their faces are colored a pushy, broiled sort of mauve-peach, and most of the scenes line up one overdefined face against another overdefined face, everybody shoved together. The dialogue trundles rather than glides, and the actors’ eyes and mouths flex and pop. Loud comedy proceeds. You sit and wait. “Springtime for Hitler” will happen, but first the principals must wear themselves out.
The Producers, as written and directed by Mel Brooks, is a dud except for that one great number. The movie staggered along until it carried that gem past the goal line. But the 1968 “Springtime” was only a placeholder. The versions made in the 21st century get the most out of the idea. The original was good enough that it worked, so “Springtime” won cult status and a chance at rebirth. But it was a poky business and it had as a capstone a piece of comedy substitute, meaning that bop Hitler with the lush hair and the “Danke schoen, baby” crap. Same for the gay director and his buddy (more of the jostling eyes). Kenneth Mars and the helmet.
The heroes make the most noise of anybody. Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel Always the Nebbish melting down and the browbeater shouting at him. One character has a highbrow-allusion name (Bloom), which seems trifling. The other has a Carson-style goofy name (Bialystock), which seems galumphing.
I saw it when I was 11 or 12, sitting in the basement and watching the family’s old black-and-white set. My brother noted points of sophistication along the way. I felt that a misidentification had taken place. This classic shown us on the screen was no classic. I’d seen the Marx Brothers. This was a no-go kind of substitute, like a rubber ball and a box of Kleenex wrapped up in place of a baby.
When I was in college I saw the movie again, at a revival house. Color didn’t help. There was the mauve-peach of the faces, and the pattern and color scheme of the gay director’s apartment. I mean yellowish wallpaper featuring swarms of small blossoms that struggle against the wallpaper’s color and collide into a field of featureless, unbounded clots struggling behind the actors’ heads. Not garish exactly, but something cunning designed to subvert eye function. If the eye had feet, one leg would be wrapped about the other and the thing’s knee would be buckling.
At last a new century arrived. The cult movie was remade, this time on Broadway. The Broadway hit was then made into a movie, which bombed. This bomb contained the splendid “Springtime for Hitler,” the deluxe and far superior “Springtime for Hitler,” now come to reign over the placeholding “Springtime for Hitler” of 1968. You doubt its status? You’re a nostalgia-mongering denier of truth. The staging and performances are splendid, and Gary Beach’s gay ham of a Hitler is poignant and razzle-dazzle at the same time. The moment when he surveys the audience and shrugs to himself, because here he is under the lights, and doesn’t fate do the unexpected—the poor babe, the sap, he’s feeling so much. But then watch him go, he burns that number down.
Susan Stroman directed the hit show and the flop movie version. No movie career after that, except one film in 2020. But she was much better at making The Producers than Mel Brooks was. Gary Beach was much better than anyone in the original movie, and this century’s “Springtime for Hitler” surpasses and vindicates last century’s “Springtime for Hitler.” The placeholder became a classic, eventually making possible the new version, which was a triumphant exaltation and apotheosis of the original idea. But the apotheosis was promptly routed into turkey status. This is a delusion of history. The second “Springtime for Hitler” was better. It was the “Springtime for Hitler” that the idea deserves.