A revival of Mel Brooks’ 1967 masterpiece The Producers has opened in the Menier Chocolate Factory, a tiny London theatre. Perhaps a bigger one wouldn’t take it. More fool them: it’s already sold out. I went to the press night – that is, I saw it with a non-Jewish audience, and it was a bizarre experience. “What a funny, silly night,” said a man as we left. Because he didn’t see what I see in The Producers. Perhaps he should be in The Producers. Like the audience of Springtime for Hitler, he didn’t get it.
The Producers is the masterpiece of American Jewish post-war culture, at least for me. Perhaps it is because it ends in prison, but in song. It’s the only way I can take it: in song. Birkenau, the Jewish event of the 20th century, didn’t end in song.
Brooks, the 2,000-Year-Old Man – what a metaphor! – always rewrites history. It’s an act of rebuke, possession and control. He is Thomas de Torquemada, Moses and Louis XIV. He is a Roman comic and the waiter at the Last Supper. I don’t know if, in The Producers, Brooks set out to write something so consciously profound. My guess is not. It was just something in him.
When Jeremy Dauber wrote the essential piece of criticism Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew, I fell on it. Serious critics often ignore Brooks. Perhaps they are too busy laughing, but Dauber thinks Brooks, despite winning the EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony), is chronically underrated. “Observe the tension between an almost slavish devotion to authority,” he writes, “and the need to remind that authority that a Jewish eye, and a Jewish tongue, can deflate even the most august of genteel (and gentile) structures. More than any other single figure of the 20th century, [Brooks] symbolises the Jewish perspective on, and contribution to, American mass entertainment.” He says Brooks often signs his letters “Your obedient Jew”. It’s both a joke and, “a snarling challenge, irony saturated”.
The Producers was Brooks’ first film. It is also his best film. You might love Young Frankenstein but Gene Wilder wrote the first draft. In Blazing Saddles I can only hear Richard Pryor’s voice. In one of many seething metaphors, Brooks didn’t make The Producers commercial. It is a claustrophobic and disorientating film: Tin Pan Alley Noir. Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) may yearn for money, not art, but Brooks is not there yet. He didn’t get there until 2001, when he launched The Producers as a Broadway musical (the London run is a revival of this). It made $1 billion and it is commercial. It has a ridiculous romantic subplot: Ulla (Lee Meredith) would not run off with Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder) because, to Bloom, Ulla is an idea. Max would not leave prison as he does in the musical but not the film: life is a prison. But I love Brooks – my idea of Brooks, at least – and so I call the commercialisation of his masterpiece his final, and most caustic, joke. As Dauber says, in The Producers Jews fail at failure. Brooks did, too.
The film, though, is the American-Jewish experience on screen and off. Brooks banned the real producer Sidney Glazier from the set after he introduced himself to a journalist with the words, “They call me the producer. Pray for me”. It was darkness and light – a breaking out. Zero Mostel, the blacklisted Yiddish theatre actor, is perfect as Bialystock. His creation is ebullient, lusty, heavy but light on his feet. The Jewish dreamer. That Mostel didn’t want the part was both telling and fortunate. “What is this?” he shouted. “A Jewish producer going to bed with an old woman on the brink of the grave? I can’t play such a part. I’m a Jewish person.” But his wife changed his mind and Brooks duly tore something disgusting out of Mostel, that he rightly feared.
If Bialystock is the Jewish dreamer, Bloom is the Jewish weeper: a panic attack in shoes. Even if Brooks wrote it that way, it pained me to see the laughter in the theatre when Bloom collapsed. But comedy is deadly. I now think that Bialystock and Bloom are both Brooks, both me and you. They are the terrorised and the terrifying, the duality of the Ashkenazi Jewish soul.
It is also payback, the mocking of ghosts. It is often forgotten that Brooks, who was born in 1926, was a veteran of the war on Nazism: he served in Normandy and Belgium in 1944. When he put a hundred Adolf Hitlers on the stage, he knew what he was writing. Springtime for Hitler opened 22 years after Birkenau was liberated and Brooks could still feel joy. It was his vengeance, and his marker.
The show goes on.
