i recently watched and completely fell in love with the 2005 version of the producers so much
so that i think two days later i watched the 1967 version and this version is very well
received it's got 7.6 out of 10 on imdb which is really great and it's one that i know a lot
of people really like and i have to say i'm pleased i watched the second producers film
first because if i'd watched this one first i might not have gone on to watch the 2005 version
it feels i i want to say first of all i enjoyed this film but now that i've seen the 2005 version
which is much better for very specific reasons it's not just the vibe i feel
like the choreography is better um the editing is better the songs are better i'm not sure
if they cut many songs out of this 60s version but it felt like there were fewer musical numbers
maybe they truncated some of them so they didn't last as long i really didn't
i didn't keep a checklist of all of the songs but the songs appear few and far between the pacing
in the 60s version is much worse really much worse and i kind of touched upon the pacing in the 2005
version as being all right the 60s version really isn't very good at that
i'm being negative but that's with a direct comparison to the 2005 version
where i can see a much better way to take the script to take the play and adapt it for film
it's done beautifully in 2005 version i would have really thoroughly enjoyed this have i seen it
first but obviously i knew how it could have been done better so i was watching it thinking well
you messed that bit up and there's a much better way to do that etc etc but it's not
fair to compare it directly particularly as this came 40 years before or thereabouts
had i never seen the play before i haven't seen it on stage and this was my first look at the
producers i think i would have still enjoyed it enough this is basically a film about leo bloom
who is an accountant uh who works alongside a broadway producer called max and together they try
and put on the worst play on broadway so that it tanks after the first night the show is cancelled
they don't have to pay back the investors and they make potentially millions of dollars
and the play is primarily or mostly about them trying to find this awful play which of course
ends up being springtime for hitler which is the play that they're going to put on in the film
will this play be an absolute flop will they make their millions or will it go horribly wrong for
them and horribly right for broadway i'm not going to say what happens but i will say that i still
really like the play choice i think springtime for hitler is so catchy the song the titular song
i just absolutely love it is obviously released in 2005 quite far away this one being released
in 67 the second world war would have still been kind of a sore spot for a lot of people um you
know people who fought in the war when they were 20 would have been in their 40s maybe 50s here
and i think it would have been a very different experience whether they watched the film or saw
the play um i think definitely in the 60s it would have been a very different kind of um vibe
and i i could say in the film's defense maybe that's why they spent very little time
actually showing us the play and showing us the dancing hitlers when you compare that to
the 2005 version where much more time is spent on that but it is very weird because mel brooks
is a director is absolutely fantastic and i find it odd that the pacing here is just so
off but maybe that's what the stage play is like maybe it's weird though because i feel
like they missed out they spent too much time they spent too much time with the old women
that's a problem that i had that lasted far too long without being important or adding anything to
the development of the narrative you'll know which bits i mean if you've seen it it sounds really
ageist if you haven't but it it makes sense um but maybe that's almost in the stage version if it is
maybe they can kind of trim that down a little bit it's just odd that this one seemed to spend far
too much time setting up the narrative not enough time allowing us to enjoy the crux of the story
it's still really short it's an hour and a half compared to the 2005 versions two
hours i feel like the other one's probably more akin to the actual length of the play
as i said not that many musical numbers in this version compared to what i would have expected or
certainly they're shorter versions of the musical numbers which again probably accounts for why this
is a much shorter film the choreography is well the actual choreography the steps themselves are
pretty decent they're pretty good um very talented dancers but there's this scene and i don't know if
i was just really over analyzing this but there's this scene where they're all marching during the
spring time for hitler song and i just felt like everybody was really out of sync with one another
and normally you know i'm not a dancer i don't have that background normally i don't notice
that kind of thing but to me it was just really blatantly obvious but there were some elements
of the choreography that i thought worked really well were really enjoyable as well um there were
certain characters who i thought were underdone um lee meredith plays oola i thought she was really
underperformed um well her performance was good but the character itself was underused i felt like
they didn't really get to the point of that character or really involve her enough i don't
know how much of her scenes they cut or how much of her dialogue they cut but again comparing it
to the 2005 version which i'm just assuming is closer to the stage version it felt like they
didn't think that character didn't really need to be there based on how little they used her
there were other characters that i thought just didn't come across very well because again they
spent so much time setting it up with max and the old women and you know not really getting anywhere
with the development of the narrative that when we do get introduced to these other characters
you know you're looking at your watch thinking well there's only 25 minutes left of this film
how can they possibly do anything decent with these characters and for a lot of it they don't so
i'm sounding very pessimistic and i guess when i when i think about it and talk about it it is not
from a technical perspective from a top storytelling perspective
you know there are a lot of things that they could have done a lot better but is
this just the benefit of hindsight i guess it is unless again stage play is like the 2005 version
and they've just badly adapted it if you've seen it on stage now let me know how does it compare i
would love to see it on stage and you know fingers crossed that does get to happen at some point
i will probably never watch the 1967 version again i did not i did not not enjoy the experience
but had i seen it i probably would have thought yeah that was all right but i don't really care
about seeing it on stage and i'm not going to watch the 2005 version that's a lie john barrowman
and matthew broderick are in the 2005 version i was always going to watch that at some point but
i'm glad i did it the other way on if you haven't seen this please watch the 2005 version first
and then give this a go i'm not going to say that just because we have a fantastic cast
and a fantastic director that this is a brilliant adaptation i'm not going to pretend that it is i
know a lot of people will be like well you can't say that about gene wilder who gave a fantastic
performance i'm not saying otherwise and i can't say that about mel brooks because
actually i can and i don't like it i don't like thinking that it's not very great
but again benefit of hindsight maybe i'm not sure it's not awful if you like musicals
give it a watch after you've seen the stage version of the 2005 version
at least i've seen it but probably definitely not what i'm going to be watching again