Mel Brooks' first feature is a musical full of grotesqueries compelling laughter as a last resort, and characters who, while venturing nowhere near attractive, still evoke a certain identification and sympathy. Washed-out Broadway producer Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) is seedy, disheveled and “fat, fat, fat,” in the words of his timid and lonely accountant, Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder). But Max has something: little old ladies (including “Hold Me Touch Me,” nobly played by Estelle Winwood) invest vast amounts in his disastrous productions in return for his love, and Bloom himself is conned, in a way charmed, into becoming Max's partner in producing the worst play in Broadway history after over-financing by 25,000%. If the play - “Springtime For Hitler,” the creation of a Nazi of the old school who maintains that Hitler was “a swell guy with a song in his heart” - fails to flop, the team of Bialystock and Bloom will be caught in the last act, “incredibly guilty.”