The Producers

Each time I've watched it - and I've watched it many times - Mel Brooks' The Producers has felt horribly pertinent to the present moment.

The Producers has many things going for it -- notably a wild, ad-lib energy that explodes in a series of sight gags and punch lines.

Mel Brooks has turned a funny idea into a slapstick film, thanks to the performers, particularly Zero Mostel.

Everything that can go wrong in an amateur film does go wrong, from the timing to the structure to the pitch of the performances.

Brooks' first feature, an absolutely hilarious and tasteless New York Jewish comedy about Broadway.

It's the ultimate punchline, the killer gag, that a proto-novel that turned into a proto-play that ended up as a movie about the worst musical in history, is now the most popular musical in town.

The film is far more consistently entertaining in the second half than in the first half, but a lot of the laughs come more from the ideas of what we’re seeing rather than their deliveries.

While the gags flow freely throughout, it's the jaw-dropping numbers from Springtime for Hitler that cement the film's place in cinema history.

Writer/director Mel Brooks' debut film and most popular farce was a zany, often brilliant spoof comedy about Broadway productions (and their producers) and the Nazis that many considered shoddy and in very bad taste. The subversive and irreverent film

You can’t say enough about the comic chemistry between Mostel and Wilder.