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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 18.07%
Worth A Look: 48.19%
Average: 19.28%
Pretty Bad: 3.61%
Total Crap: 10.84%
9 reviews, 29 user ratings
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| Producers, The (2005) |
by Elaine Perrone
"37 years later, it's still Springtime for Hitler."
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After skewering director Rob Marshall for his mistreatment of Arthur Golden’s delicate Memoirs of a Geisha, it seems only fair to give praise where glorious praise is due him – for his dazzling transfer of the musical Chicago from stage to screen. Watching Susan Stroman’s rather clunky screen adaptation of her own (and of course Mel Brooks’) Broadway smash hit, The Producers, I couldn’t help but long for a bit more of the same movie magic.That’s not to say that the third incarnation of The Producers is without its joys.
Mel Brooks’ characters are as fresh – and side-splittingly funny – today as they were when they first made their groundbreaking appearance in 1968. The exploits of lecherous, luckless producer Max Bialystock and his sidekick, ultra-neurotic accountant Leo Bloom, are a delight, as are the antics of cross-dressing director Roger De Bris and his “common-law assistant” Carmen Ghia. In the hands of Will Ferrell, neo-Nazi playwright and Hitler disciple Franz Liebkind is as much a hoot now as he was 37 years ago in the very different hands of Kenneth Mars. (Gone from the original movie in both the stage musical and the 2005 film is Dick Shawn’s hippie-dippy Hitler, Lorenzo St. DuBois a/k/a LSD, the only character that would undoubtedly have compromised the script’s timelessness.)
Even improving on the original is the character of Swedish sexpot-secretary-starlet Ulla, as portrayed by Uma Thurman (“Ulla/Uma”?), in an impressive personification of the title of her knockout solo, “When You’ve Got It, Flaunt It.”
Likewise, Gary Beach appears to be having great fun reprising the role he made his own on stage as flamboyant, talent-challenged director De Bris, and Roger Bart (“Desperate Housewives”) might well deserve a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his hilarious utterance of the single word “Yesssssssssssss.”
Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick have been criticized elsewhere for their over-the-top performances in the movie, accused of still “playing to the cheap seats,” a charge I find hard to swallow since neither Zero Mostel nor Gene Wilder was exactly a study in subtlety in the original film.
Where the transfer from live theatre to screen falters is in Stroman’s staging, a setbound affair in which almost every scene appears to have been lifted in one piece out of the St. James Theater and dropped intact onto the studio soundstage. That the overwhelming sensation of neophyte Stroman’s screen “direction” is of her training a video camera on the proceedings and instructing the actors to emote only exacerbates the feeling of their playing to the balcony.Notwithstanding the disappointingly stagy and claustrophobic feel of The Producers 2005, Mel Brooks’ classic script alone elevates The Producers Any Year Any Version to “must see” territory. For me, the only two things left to ponder are (1) why-oh-why was Rob Marshall somewhere else when he might have been here? and (2) I wonder what Susan Stroman might have accomplished with Memoirs of a Geisha.
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link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=13661&reviewer=376
originally posted: 12/22/05 07:52:11
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USA
16-Dec-2005 (PG-13)
DVD: 16-May-2006
UK
N/A
Australia
12-Jan-2006
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