MOVIE REVIEW

Mel Brooks may have finally hit upon a way to lose money with "Springtime for Hitler."

By Kevin Crust, Times Staff Writer

The faux play was the centerpiece of theatrical producers Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) and Leo Bloom's (Gene Wilder) scheme to make a bundle of money by intentionally staging a huge flop in Brooks' 1968 movie comedy, "The Producers." Much to their mortification, the play becomes a huge hit and they're sent to prison. The same premise was used for the 2001 Broadway musical starring Nathan Lane as Max and Matthew Broderick as Leo. The movie garnered Brooks a screenwriting Oscar while the musical won 12 Tonys and became a financial phenomenon.

Now, Brooks, Lane and Broderick, along with director Susan Stroman, making her feature film debut, have brought "The Producers" back from the Great White Way in the form of a grand, old-school movie musical. But whereas the original film is gleefully crass and energetically paced, the movie musical, weighing in at a robust two-plus hours, is bloated and self-satisfied. Whatever spectacle the stage musical possessed to make it such a box-office behemoth fails to transfer to the screen and will likely be enjoyed mainly by those who hold fond memories of seeing it on Broadway.

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Lane and Broderick are solid as the impresario who specializes in duds and his gullible accountant, respectively, but sing and mug as they must, they can't hold a candle to Mostel and Wilder when it comes to the comedy. Ever the impudent pug, Lane wheedles where Mostel, with his great basset hound eyes, seduces. Broderick's broad, aw-shucks enthusiasm pales beside Wilder's sly impishness.

Although the additions of Uma Thurman as "receptionist" Ulla Inga Hansen Benson Yonsen Tallen-Hallen Svaden Svanson and Will Ferrell as Franz Liebkind, the maniacal German playwright, add star power, they do little to make up for the fact that none of the other musical numbers is a match for the sheer brazenness and wonderful camp of the centerpiece performance of "Springtime for Hitler." Broadway holdovers Gary Beach (as Roger De Bris, the "worst director in New York") and Roger Bart (as Carmen Ghia, De Bris' assistant who wears a facial mole as an accessory) fare better, with Beach's role significantly pumped up from the 1968 film.

The original movie — a culture-clash time warp of New York theater nostalgia and '60s grooviness (remember Dick Shawn as L.S.D.?) — holds up because it's sharp and biting. The new film is more stolidly set in 1959, though as in the stage show, the Village People seem to have replaced hippies as the out-of-place pop cultural touchstone.

A five-time Tony winner for choreography and direction, Stroman doesn't attempt a frenetic stylization à la Rob Marshall (another choreographer turned director) with "Chicago" in 2002, nor does Brooks and collaborator Thomas Meehan's screenplay feel as smart and fresh as Bill Condon's treatment of that Kander-Ebb musical. Of course, not all attempts to make theatrical adaptations cinematic are successful — see Chris Columbus' recent swooning music video-like treatment of "Rent" — but something other than a staid keepsake of the stage event is preferable.

As creaky as the traditional musicals it once poked fun at, "The Producers" has been entombed — lox, shtick and two smoking bagels — as a theatrical fossil, and reinforces the danger in returning to the same material one time too many.


'The Producers'

MPAA rating: PG-13 for sexual humor and references

Times guidelines: Typical Brooks' bawdiness is unlikely to offend at this point

A Universal Pictures and Columbia Pictures presentation. Director Susan Stroman. Producers Mel Brooks, Jonathan Sanger. Screenplay by Mel Brooks & Thomas Meehan, based on the 1968 screenplay by Brooks and the 2001 stage musical by Brooks and Meehan. Directors of photography John Bailey, Charles Minsky. Editor Steven Weisberg. Costume designer William Ivey Long. Music Mel Brooks. Production designer Mark Friedberg.

Running time: 2 hours, 14 minutes.