Mel Brooks bursts through the gates of Hollywood, writing and directing a lasting favorite for his first feature film, but he had some trouble finding a willing dance partner. Major studios were reluctant to back this bawdy comedy, which sets a pair of unscrupulous theatrical types on the road to the biggest flop in Broadway history. The stiff, neurotic accountant has found a legal loophole that would make an unsuccessful production far more profitable than a long-running one, and the scummy, low-rent producer knows all the right connections to make exactly that sort of disastrous musical. Although Brooks was clearly taking the piss, exorcising old ghosts with his signature brand of irreverent humor, the big dogs in tinsel town weren’t anxious to greenlight a comedy with Adolf Hitler in a major role, no matter how absurd and disparaging his portrayal might have been.

The big showtuney play these cockeyed crooks have contrived is dubbed “Springtime for Hitler,” an adoring ode to all things Axis, and it’s spectacular. A perfect catalog of bad taste and glitzy over-indulgence, it's the kind of terrible that wraps all the way around to become its own brand of perverse, delightful entertainment. Which, to the chagrin of our over-leveraged executives, is exactly how their captive audience sees things. The audience members' shocked initial reactions are responsible for some of the film’s biggest laughs, a sea of dropped jaws and palms-upon-foreheads, while their eventual, impossible acceptance powers the story’s penultimate curves. It’s a smartly flawed scheme, and a great showcase for Brooks’s deliciously twisted sense of humor. I just wish we could’ve spent more time in the glow of that riotous premiere performance. A lot more time.

The road to those onstage spoils is awfully long, and the imbalance between long setup and brisk payoff/outcome probably belies Brooks’s inexperience as a filmmaker. That opening act, which runs for about 2/3 of the film, is loaded with wacky eccentrics; hilarious characters that suffer for their proximity to so many others of the same type. We spend so long dwelling on Zero Mostel’s shameless machinations, Gene Wilder’s manic outbursts, Kenneth Mars’s dim-witted goose steps, Christopher Hewett’s flamboyant cross-dressings and the inane passions of about a dozen more over-colored supporting players, there just doesn’t seem to be enough leftover time to deliver the goods and wrap it all up. Most of these roles, if not all, are well-cast and undeniably funny, but they complicate the plot and hamper our progress to the bigger payoffs. Oversights that were corrected and improved, decades later, by the stage adaptation and succeeding cinematic remake.

_The Producers ’67_ has all the right components, and a wickedly avant-garde sense of humor, but it also has big problems. It’s akin to reading the rough draft of an all-time favorite.