Comedy is a major thread running through some of the Blu-rays streeting on July 2nd. Case in point: Shout Factory is bringing two comedy favorites to the HD format: The Producers and The Kentucky Fried Movie. Legendary humorist Mel Brooks' first feature-length film, The Producers remains one of the funniest movies ever made. It's the satirical, occasionally tasteless saga of Max Bialystock (the late, great Zero Mostel), a Broadway producer who cooks up a can't-miss - or so he thinks - scheme to profit off a potential stage flop. As later pictures like Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles have demonstrated, Brooks has a gift for anarchic humor, and The Producers shows him operating at the peak of his abilities; the film thrives off Brooks' absurdist script and the lead performances from Mostel and Gene Wilder, who kickstarted his career with his turn as Bialystock's nebbish accountant Leo Bloom.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman calls The Producers "incessantly manic...[and] filled with in jokes aimed at showbiz cognoscenti...Time has mostly been very kind to The Producers, helped in no small measure by the reevaluation the film experienced when Brooks' outlandishly successful musical version took Broadway by storm. The musical version reinstated several ostensibly offensive punch lines that producer Joseph E. Levine had nixed from this original version, and it also considerably augmented the roles of luscious secretary Ulla and mincing assistant to Roger, Carmen Ghia. The film is probably still a bit too noisy for its own good, with a relentlessly hyperbolic performance by Mostel that some still find more annoying than hilarious. Brooks' take-no-prisoners approach to the wild and wooly ways of show business may in fact have something to offend nearly everyone, but it similarly has laughs galore and remains one of the most piquant parodies of all time."
Like The Producers, The Kentucky Fried Movie represents the beginning for comedic filmmakers. It is the second full-length picture from John Landis, who later went on to direct such classics as National Lampoon's Animal House, The Blues Brothers, and Three Amigos!, and the first film from Airplane! and The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! screenwriters David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker. The Kentucky Fried Movie definitely hews closely to the Airplane style of moviemaking: throw a ton of gags at the screen, and enough of them will stick. But Landis makes his presence known as well; he gives this chaos (The Kentucky Fried Movie takes the shape of a free-form anthology reel) good pace and forward momentum, never allowing viewers to pause long enough on the bits that don't work.
Jeffrey Kauffman's Blu-ray review comments on the movie's "relatively normal situations...[that] then just g[et] bat guano crazy...Nothing was sacred to these guys, and the film has pointed jabs at a variety of societal peccadilloes. At other times, the film is remarkably gentle in tone, with weird little moments like in the longish parody A Fistful of Yen, where 'action star' Evan Kim speaks in an Elmer Fudd dialect. The film is an unabashedly juvenile exercise and while not every bit lands, there's a general sense of anarchic merriment here that helps to carry The Kentucky Fried Movie through some of its lamer moments. It's an obviously early effort by all of these future luminaries, and while there's a whiff of 'let's throw everything we can think of at the screen, and see what sticks,' one of those elements that did attach itself quite remarkably was the handwriting on the wall that some major comedic talents had arrived."
Universal's The Trouble with Harry, on the other hand, finds humor in the macabre, courtesy of director Alfred Hitchcock's dark sensibilities. While many of Hitchcock's films are quite funny - parts of North by Northwest, for example, play like a screwball farce, and his underrated 1942 thriller Saboteur gets a big boost from the acidly hilarious contributions of satirist Dorothy Parker - The Trouble with Harry is one of the few overt laughers the Master of Suspense ever made. It's a sly, understated comedy of manners that studies how the title character's sudden death impacts his small New England town (hint: his corpse barely registers among those who knew him best). Critics and audiences didn't know what to make of this strange, gently cynical picture during its release in 1955, but The Trouble with Harry has garnered a cult following over the years; for a movie that pivots around death, it's one of Hitchcock's most relaxed and easygoing works.
Kenneth Brown lauds the film "as both a sharp smalltown whodunit and a fun, bitingly bleak farce...[It's] one of Hitchcock's quirkiest, funniest and most tragically overlooked films; one that was such a colossal failure upon its release that it almost disappeared from memory and still remains an obscure, oft-forgotten classic few people have heard of, much less enjoyed. The Trouble with Harry isn't quite a masterpiece, at least not by Rear Window or Vertigo standards, but it delivers on its promise and hits all the right notes."