[Mel Brooks' "The Producers"] did not make me laugh as much as I had anticipated, and perhaps anticipation is part of the problem. Let us suppose that an acquaintance stops us in the street with the announcement that he is going to tell us the funniest joke ever told. But first, he tells us, he is going to synopsize the joke, describe its high and low points, analyze the style of its telling, compare it with other jokes in the same genre from other eras, and psychoanalyze those listeners who will laugh at it and those who will not. Then and only then does he tell us the joke. Do we laugh? Not likely. The element of surprise is gone because we listen with too many preconceptions. In short, we listen more to the how of style than to the what of content….

The idea that two Jewish producers would engage in a project called "Springtime for Hitler" even as part of a swindle is more a cabaret idea than a movie idea. Even on the Borscht Circuit, a Jewish comedian can assume a Nazi role as a temporarily shocking point of departure to arouse black laughter in his audience…. Cabaret characterizations are entirely hypothetical. If you accept such and such a premise, such and such will occur. Screen characterizations are historical. The characters played by Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder are obviously if not blatantly Jewish, and they carry their pasts around with them while they humor a psychotic Nazi author to the point of singing "Deutschland Uber Alles" and wearing swastika armbands….

However, even if we assume that there were two Jewish producers greedy enough to do something so distasteful, it is difficult to laugh, however blackly, at a plot device that has received so much advance publicity. As it turns out, the whole movie is based on this one plot premise that is supposed to attest to the New Audacity in movies. Instead everything in "The Producers" attests to the New Vulgarity.

Except for two or three expert sequences, the direction of Mel Brooks is thoroughly vile and inept. Everyone in the film down to the least extra mugs with an extravagance not seen since the most florid silent days. When "Springtime for Hitler" is finally staged, the audience looks with collectively wide-eyed, wide-mouthed shock and amazement at a hilariously professional mixed chorus of boys and girls in black jackets and swastikas tapping, kicking, and prancing away. But why should an audience be so shocked at a show called "Springtime for Hitler?" What did they expect? the realistic conscience of the medium keeps whispering in my ear. To make matters worse, the audience within the film begins roaring with laughter at precisely that instant when the spectacle on the stage within the film ceases to be amusing….

At a time when film aestheticians are solemnly debating the merits of looking directly at the camera to talk to the audience, Mel Brooks indulges in asides too stagey even for the stage….

"The Producers" resembles "Enter Laughing" both in its conceptual and directorial crudity and in its isolated moments of hilarity with stage struck mediocrities. "The Producers" is in a class by itself as a movie that completely ignores the existence of women except as props, toys, or old bags. I hope this isn't a trend in the bright new world of sophisticated cinema. (p. 47)