Мел Брукстың "Өндірушілер" фильмі

Film by Mel Brooks
The Producers is a 1967 American satirical black comedy film written and directed by Mel Brooks and starring Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder, Dick Shawn, and Kenneth Mars. The film is about a con artist theater producer and his accountant who scheme to get rich by fraudulently overselling interests in a stage musical purposely designed to fail. They find a script celebrating Adolf Hitler and the Nazis and bring it to the stage. Because of this theme, The Producers was controversial from the start and received mixed reviews. It became a cult film and found a more positive critical reception later. The Producers was Brooks's directorial debut. For the film, he won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. In 1996, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and placed eleventh on the AFI's 100 Years 100 Laughs list. It was later adapted by Brooks and Thomas Meehan as a stage musical, which itself was adapted into a film.

Max Bialystock is an aging Broadway producer whose career has veered from great success to the depths of near failure. He now ekes out a hand to mouth existence while romancing lascivious, wealthy elderly women in exchange for money for a "next play" that may never be produced. Accountant Leopold "Leo" Bloom, a nervous young man prone to hysterics, arrives at Max's office to audit his accounts and discovers a $2,000 discrepancy in the accounts of Max's last play. Max persuades Leo to hide the fraud, and Leo realizes that, since a flop is expected to lose money, the IRS will not investigate its finances, so a producer could earn more from a flop than from a hit by overselling interests and embezzling the funds. Max instantly puts this scheme into action. They will oversell shares on a massive scale and produce a play that will close on opening night, thus avoiding payouts and leaving the duo free to flee to Rio de Janeiro with the profits. The partners find the ideal play for their scheme: Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden: a “love letter to Hitler" written by deranged ex Nazi soldier Franz Liebkind. Leo and Max bond with Liebkind over Schnapps and tell him they want to show the world a positive representation of Hitler. Now with the stage rights, Max sells 25,000% of the play to investors. To guarantee the show's failure, they hire Roger De Bris, a flamboyant gay director, whose plays are routinely cancelled as soon as the actors start rehearsing. The part of Hitler goes to a hippie named Lorenzo Saint DuBois, also known, in a reference to the counterculture drug, as L. S. D., who wanders into the theater during the casting call. At the theater on opening night, Max tries to ensure a harshly negative review by attempting to bribe The New York Times theatre critic. The play opens with a lavish production of the title song, "Springtime for Hitler", which celebrates Nazi Germany conquering Europe ("Springtime for Hitler and Germany/Winter for Poland and France"). L. S. D. then comes on stage as Hitler, and his beatnik like portrayal reveals that De Bris has directed the play as a satire. To Leo and Max's horror, Springtime for Hitler is a hit, so their investors will be expecting a larger financial return than can be paid out. A gun wielding Franz confronts Leo and Max. He tries first to shoot them, and then himself, but runs out of bullets. The three then decide to blow up the theater to end the production, but they are caught in the explosion and arrested. At the trial, where they are found "incredibly guilty" by the jury, Leo makes an impassioned statement praising Max for being his friend and changing his life. Leo, Max, and Franz are sent to the state penitentiary and produce a new musical called Prisoners of Love. While Max and Franz supervise rehearsals, Leo oversells shares of the play to their fellow prisoners and the warden.

A substantive early New York Times account of the property’s genesis dates to December 1961: “Edward Padula has acquired a new comedy by Mel Broooks tentatively called ‘Springtime for Hitler.’ The producer said yesterday that actually ‘Hitler is not in the comedy.’ ‘It’s a sort of play within a play. The setting is contemporary England.’ Kenneth Williams, rated by Mr. Padula as ‘England’s new comic discovery’ is under consideration for the leading role Work on the new Brooks comedy will start immediately after the local presentation of ‘All American’.”

The title Springtime for Hitler was first coined by Brooks as a joke during the press conference for All American in 1962. Shortly afterwards, he also decided to relate this title to a character named Leo Bloom, an homage to Leopold Bloom, protagonist of James Joyce's Ulysses. It was reused by him years later once he had an idea about "two schnooks on Broadway who set out to produce a flop and swindle the backers". and the scheme had origins in two theater producers who had a lavish lifestyle while making various unsuccessful plays. When imagining what play "would have people packing up and leaving the theatre even before the first act is over", Brooks decided to combine Adolf Hitler and a musical. In another interview, he further explained his reasoning, stating,

More than anything the great Holocaust by the Nazis is probably the great outrage of the 20th century. There is nothing to compare with it. And  so what can I do about it? If I get on the soapbox and wax eloquently, it'll be blown away in the wind, but if I do Springtime for Hitler it'll never be forgotten. I think you can bring down totalitarian governments faster by using ridicule than you can with invective. Brooks first envisioned his story as a novel, and changed it to a play when publishers told him it had "too much dialogue. Not enough narrative". He wrote the script in nine months, with the help of secretary Alfa Betty Olsen. During the process, he mentioned in an October 1966 interview with Playboy that he was working on Springtime for Hitler, "a play within a play, or a play within a film – I haven't decided yet". Then, it evolved into a screenplay to take advantage of various settings, as "it could go places, it wouldn’t have to stay in the office". Glazier budgeted the film at $1 million, and sought financiers. Half the money came from philanthropist Louis Wolfson, who liked the idea of laughing at a dictator, As Brooks "couldn't think of anybody to direct it", eventually he decided to take the task for himself, even though he himself had only directed one play before. The now demolished Playhouse Theatre hosted the Springtime for Hitler play, and various actors who heard the film was seeking an actor for Hitler were cast in the musical number. The crew tried to film on location whenever possible, filming on such midtown Manhattan locales as Central Park, the Empire State Building, and Lincoln Center. was a disaster and the studio considered shelving it. However, relief came when Pink Panther star Peter Sellers saw the film privately and placed an advertisement in Variety in support of the film's wide release. The film allegedly was "banned in Germany". The film was screened in New York City in March 1968. The film's wide release took place on March 18, 1968. The title of the film for the Swedish release uses the translation of the name of the play within the story, Springtime for Hitler. As a result of its success, most of Mel Brooks' subsequent films in Swedish were given similar titles, despite being otherwise unrelated: Springtime for Mother In Law,
Springtime for the Sheriff, Springtime for Frankenstein, Springtime for the Silent Movies, Springtime for the Lunatics, Springtime for World History, Springtime for Space, and Springtime for the Slum. The practice ended by the time Robin Hood: Men in Tights was released, at Brooks' request.

When it was first released, the film received a mixed response and garnered some exceptionally harsh reviews, while others considered it a great success. One of the mixed reviews came from Renata Adler, who, writing for The New York Times, stated: "The Producers, which opened yesterday at the Fine Arts Theater, is a violently mixed bag. Some of it is shoddy and gross and cruel; the rest is funny in an entirely unexpected way." About the acting, she writes that Mostel is "overacting grotesquely under the direction of Mel Brooks" and that, in the role of Max Bialystock, he is "as gross and unfunny as only an enormous comedian bearing down too hard on some frail, tasteless routines can be". Co star Wilder fares better and is called "wonderful", thanks to doing "fine", despite being "forced to be as loud and as fast as Mostel" and "[g]oing through long, infinitely variegated riffs and arpeggios of neuroticism", and playing his part "as though he were Dustin Hoffman being played by Danny Kaye". She also puts the movie into the bigger context of "contemporary" comedy and that it has the same "episodic, revue quality" in the way it is "not building laughter, but stringing it together skit after skit, some vile, some boffo". Her early conclusion, at the end of the first paragraph, is also a comparison to other comedic movies of the time, it reads: "[The Producers] is less delicate than Lenny Bruce, less funny than Dr. Strangelove, but much funnier than The Loved One or What's New Pussycat?" The more critical and negative reviews partly targeted the directorial style and broad ethnic humor, but also commonly noted the bad taste and insensitivity of devising a broad comedy about two Jews conspiring to cheat theatrical investors by devising a designed to fail tasteless Broadway musical about Hitler only 23 years after the end of World War II. Among the most harsh critics were Stanley Kauffmann in The New Republic, who wrote that "the film bloats into sogginess" and "Springtime for Hitler  doesn't even rise to the level of tastelessness", John Simon wrote The Producers "is a model of how not to make a comedy", and Pauline Kael who called it "amateurishly crude" in The New Yorker. Kael went on to say,

The Producers isn't basically unconventional; it only seems so because it's so amateurishly crude and because it revels in the kind of show business Jewish humor that used to be considered too specialized for movies. Screenwriters used to take the Jewish out but now that television comedians exploit themselves as stereotypes, screenwriters are putting the Jewish in. On the other hand, others considered the film to be a great success. Time magazine's reviewers wrote that the film was "hilariously funny" but pointed out that "the film is burdened with the kind of plot that demands resolution" but unfortunately "ends in a whimper of sentimentality". Although they labelled it "disjointed and inconsistent", they also praised it as "a wildly funny joy ride", and concluded by saying that "despite its bad moments, [it] is some of the funniest American cinema comedy in years". The film industry trade paper Variety wrote, "The film is unmatched in the scenes featuring Mostel and Wilder alone together, and several episodes with other actors are truly rare." Over the years, the film has gained in stature. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 91% based on 74 reviews with an average rating of 8.2/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "A hilarious satire of the business side of Hollywood, The Producers is one of Mel Brooks' finest, as well as funniest films, featuring standout performances by Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel." On Metacritic, the film received a score of 96 based on 6 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". In his review decades later, Roger Ebert claimed, "this is one of the funniest movies ever made". Ebert wrote, "I remember finding myself in an elevator with Brooks and his wife, actress Anne Bancroft, in New York City a few months after The Producers was released. A woman got onto the elevator, recognized him and said, 'I have to tell you, Mr. Brooks, that your movie is vulgar.' Brooks smiled benevolently. 'Lady,' he said, 'it rose below vulgarity. The film was a sleeper hit at the U. S. box office.

In 2002, The Producers was re released in three theaters by Rialto Pictures and earned $111,866 at the box office. As of 2007, the film continues to be distributed to art film and repertory cinemas by Rialto. Brooks has adapted the story twice more, as a Broadway musical (The Producers, 2001) and a film based on the musical (The Producers, 2005). He did not direct the latter, but served as a producer. Unlike the original film, it was not commercially successful. This film has spawned several home media releases on VHS, Laserdisc, CED, and VCD from companies such as Magnetic Video, Embassy Home Entertainment, PolyGram Video, Speedy, and Lumiere Video. A 1997 letterbox edition Laserdisc was released by PolyGram Video, which served as the basis for the extremely rare 1998 PolyGram DVD release. Metro Goldwyn Mayer, which owns video rights to select Embassy Pictures titles that ended up with Nelson Entertainment and Polygram, released The Producers on Region 1 DVD in 2002 and reissued in 2005 to coincide with the remake released that year. In 2013, MGM licensed the title to Shout! Factory to release a DVD and Blu ray combo pack with a new HD transfer and newly produced bonus materials. StudioCanal, worldwide rights holder to all of the Embassy Pictures library, has also released several R2 DVD editions using a transfer slightly different from the North American DVD and Blu Ray releases. In 2018, StudioCanal gave the film its European Blu Ray debut in the UK, Germany, and Australia. The StudioCanal releases included most extras from the Shout! Factory release as well as a new 4K restoration for a 50th anniversary Blu ray edition.