The Producers (2005)

The Producers arrives in 2005 as a filmed record of a Broadway musical that was itself a musicalization of a 1967 movie, which makes it a remake wearing the costume of an adaptation. Susan Stroman directs with the fidelity of a stage manager preserving blocking for posterity, and the result plays like a 3-D IMAX film without the glasses. Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick reprise their stage roles with vigor calibrated for the back row. The plot concerns two men who scheme to oversell shares in a guaranteed flop, a fraud that requires the worst musical ever written. They settle on Springtime for Hitler.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is a curious artifact. Roger De Bris, the flamboyant director, and his partner Carmen Ghia occupy the comic center, and the number Keep It Gay announces its intentions without apology. This is camp as punchline, not as platform, and the treatment is of its vintage. Ulla exists to be leered at, hired on sight for her proportions. Leo Bloom clutches a security blanket and panics at ledgers, a neurotic type played for laughs. The embezzlement plot gestures at wealthy investors and Broadway greed, though the target is fraud, not the economic order. There is no climate sermon, no racial reckoning, no body-positive overture.

The picture's most striking quality is its refusal to moralize. Mel Brooks built his career on the premise that taste is a fence to be climbed, and this material still wants to offend rather than instruct. The satire lands on Nazis and their admirers, which is a safe enough quarry in any decade. What the film lacks in subtlety it makes up for in commitment, and what it lacks in cultural instruction it makes up for in nothing, because it never attempts any. A relic of a gentler provocation, preserved on celluloid for the theater crowd.