While Mel Brooks typically delivers with his comedies, it seems that it wasn't to be in his first film in which he served as writer/director.

Starring as Broadway producer Max Bialystock is Zero Mostel, who delivers the best performance in the film. He's a cheap & sleazy guy who serves as gigolo to elderly women to fund his Broadway plays, but when accountant Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder) comes to check his books and casually lets slip the idea that funding a literally & figuratively cheap play for thousands with a budget in the millions would yield a bigger profit than a successful play since the I.R.S. wouldn't bother to track the fiscal revenue of a flop play, then Max sees it at as the solution to all of his problems. Thus begins both Max's weening of Leo into actually making this idea a reality since he'd need him for accounting, and of course, the search for the worst play of all time.

The supporting cast included Kenneth Mars as ex-Nazi Franz Liebkind who wrote the musical "Springtime For Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden." His comical recurring appearances in the film help the rating, while the play's cross-dressing director Roger De Bris (Christopher Hewitt) and his bizarre assistant Carmen Ghia (Andreas Voutsinas) fail to be funny, despite the implications of what they could provide to the story. Though since this film was originally released back in 1968, then those two characters would've been much more shocking to audiences than nowadays where several characters like that have been funnier numerous times before, hence why they're both forgetful characters overall. However Dick Shawn's portrayal of Adolf Hitler was comical, fit his motif for playing over-the-top characters, and was comical enough for "Springtime For Hitler" to become the unexpected, and unintentional hit of the year.

The musical itself was the best part in the film as it provided the most laughs, but like "An American Werewolf In London" (1981) & "The Lost Boys" (1987) after it, this satisfactory moment which makes the film doesn't come until an hour has passed, with only another half hour remaining to rush the story to the finish, which are the mistakes that all three of aforementioned films made: their satisfactory moments and climaxes were rushed in the final third of the runtime, killing the overall rating, and in this film's case, given that it's a comedy, fails more so since there wasn't anything laughable in the first hour of the film. So the only thing that saved it was the musical, since even the great pairing of Gene Wilder & Zero Mostel did zero things for me and the film [Pun Intended].

In the end, don't count on this Gene Wilder/Zero Mostel classic Brook's comedy to leave you in stitches, for it doesn't come close to it for any decent amount of time in the film.