Mel Brooks
The Producers

It's nice when you feel an idea taking shape. I like coffee, but more than the flavor, I find it rewarding to feel the water climbing up a level, knocking timidly on the aluminum door, and making love with the ground powder. Bitter juice, the idea, that is born for a moment all to be drunk. And to write before it disappears down the esophagus.

An Inter fan in a class full of Juventus and Milan supporters. The 90s at school. No, they were not fun: Mondays were like a tragedy lasting over 10 years. The turning point came in 2004. Greece. Damn Greece, a country that had never seen guys like the Laudrup brothers even through the Hubble telescope, won the Europeans filling the leagues of the old continent with useless players. At that moment I realized that the turning point was just around the corner: if Greece had won the Europeans, my Inter could really make it. Proof that luck is truly blind.

This is the first movie by Mel Brooks, and I stumbled upon it almost by accident.

Dated 1968, “The producers - Per Favore Non Toccate Le Vecchiette” is a little gem aging in an enviable manner. The main reason lies in the goodness of an original screenplay that to call brilliant, especially for the time, is truly an understatement. A former great Broadway theatre producer is reduced to rehashing his glorious past and being a gigolo for rich and spry old ladies across New York to make ends meet, thanks to their checks, producing shows that invariably are pitiful. He seems doomed until an accounting auditor inadvertently reveals to him a ridiculous way to scrape together a pile of money. To create, with the least possible expense, a colossal low-quality show of a million dollars, pocketing all the money handed out by the old ladies and not spent on the theatre production. A necessary condition for the plan's success: that the work is a total failure and generates no profit. But in this Max Bialystock, who hasn't seen a success for decades, is a real pro. The best on the field, and the plan seems perfect.

So begins the hunt for the tremendous trash, the most horrendous script ever written to then hand it over to the worst director in the field and the mindless interpretation of debuting actors on stage. But if it's true, and Greece and Denmark know it well, that luck is sometimes blind, it's equally true that misfortune in most cases sees very clearly!

Fast and sparkling rhythm, gags a-plenty with a spectacular exaggeration of all the main characters, without neglecting great attention to the minor ones like the wonderful secretary, the porter, and the director. The seasoned and affable old producer manages to mold the young accountant like warm clay just as Gassman did, a few years earlier, in “Il Sorpasso” with the law student. Great attention to detail, for a comedy never vulgar, resulting from an inspired and creative script enhanced by the outstanding performances of Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder. If I taught acting, I'd show aspiring actors the scenes and facial expressions of these actors. And the tip of their pencils, damn, they should sharpen several times with so many notes to take.

A film, therefore, on the unpredictability and irrationality of success. This work paved the way for many other pieces that, with varying success, have ridden the same structure: misfortune as the bearer of sarcastic, bastard, and unexpected justice. And between one laugh and another, a beautiful snapshot of the society of that period. Which, 40 years later, reading the newspapers and looking around a bit, doesn't seem to have changed much and makes us realize how far ahead of his time Mel Brooks was.

Close to the level of "Young Frankenstein" and "High Anxiety", even though inexplicably little known, “The Producers” is a title I warmly recommend you to look for or recall if you preserve a faint memory of it.