Speaking of the 50’s blacklist. Night before last we watched “The Producers” again, which stars Zero Mostel who was blacklisted for refusing to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee back in 1955. I’d only seen “The Producers” once before, many years ago, and was glad when Marty picked it up earlier in the week. I remembered that the first time I’d watched it I was expecting to love it, didn’t, and I’d been wondering if I’d feel differently now.
It’s a film I want to love. The casting is remarkable. The acting is fearless, ferociously over the top. The plot is great. Everything is tuned to suck you right in the moment the film starts rolling, drag you relentless around the reel and leave you breathless and begging for more. What kills it for me is the style of cinematography. It was shot by Joseph Coffeey who doesn’t have a long list of credits, has only 3 films for which he’s listed as cinematographer and eight for which he was a camera operator. One of his credits for cinematographer is “Up the Down Staircase.” Again, “Up the Down Staircase” is a film I’ve not seen since I was a kid, but I remember it as having a successful moodiness to it. Then I notice that the last film he’s apparently worked on before “The Producers”, this time as camera operator, was Samuel Beckett’s “Film”, directed by Alan Schneider and starring Buster Keaton. I thought if I was a director and was doing “The Producers” this is exactly what I would want, a whiff of Beckett’s tragic-comedy in the film grain. And perhaps there’s something to it because I look up “Film” and find a 1969 article by Alan Schneider on what Beckett wanted in “Film” and initially they’d wanted Charlie Chaplin or Zero Mostel.
Seeing that “Up the Down Staircase” was black and white, as was “Film”, I rerun “The Producers” in my mind and wonder if I’d feel differently about the same movie if it was desaturated. Maybe not. There’s no mood to the cinematography and I can’t convince myself it’s just because Coffey was shooting with black-and-white in mind when he was doing color. The lights are too bright, sterile and even. The style of shooting effects watching a play, and you want that broadness here, room for Wilder and Mostel to have their way with the stage, up down and all over it, chewing up every morsel of real estate. But the camera needed to move with them. It needed to be involved, in the mess, following every swing as an unblinking participant rather than a polite member of the audience with ticket in hand. Wanted a Coen brothers kind of brutalness to it. That “The Producers”‘ cinematography comes off to me as 70s television sound stage spartan and uncreative, probably has more to do with Mel Brooks. It’s a style that worked great with “Blazing Saddles”; by then he was pulling back and making full use of the staging area as scene shaping story and performance, a part of the plot. Perhaps he was on his way there with “The Producers” but the style didn’t fit here and wasn’t radical enough to be useful anyway.
So I don’t like “The Producers.” It’s a film I want to love. Really want to love. The idea of two men making money off a sure flop, the musical “Springtime for Hitler”, is as bitterly insane as it gets. Dick Shawn as the beat-hippy actor playing Hitler is more an audacious mess than I remembered. The plot, even today, is gutsier than I think many imagine, and perhaps one reason the movie’s enjoyable for so many is the cinematography keeps the social commentary on a soft poke-pinch level for those who don’t want to get too scratched up swimming through the gutter, down through the grating to the dark sewers.
I’ve not seen “The Producers” with Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick and Uma Thurman and don’t really want to. If anyone wants to convince me otherwise, feel free to try.
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