The 1959 movie Mel Brooks called “possibly the worst ever made”
He’s made a couple of bad movies, but Mel Brooks has never made anything that anyone would call one of the worst ever made. And yet, in a massively beneficial twist of irony, a film he called exactly that was directly responsible for launching his legendary big-screen career.
After breaking new ground and ushering in a new era of mainstream Hollywood comedy with The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein, Brooks’ work as a writer and director eventually tapered off, with his filmmaking swansong, Dracula: Dead and Loving It, his professional nadir.
Ending his behind-the-camera tenure with the worst-reviewed picture in his filmography hasn’t done a thing to dent his reputation as one of the most important figures in comedy history, though, and he owes much of it to the man responsible for the 1959 fantasy that he held in such low esteem.
In 1958, producer Joseph E Levine purchased the American distribution rights to Hercules, starring Steve Reeves in the title role. Backed by a huge marketing push, it earned over $5million at the box office in the United States, sold over 65million tickets worldwide, and inevitably led to a sequel, but we’ll get to that.
A decade later, Brooks was trying to get the money together for his first feature, The Producers, with Levine’s Embassy Pictures stepping in to foot the other half of the movie’s million-dollar budget, albeit on the condition that the title was changed from Springtime for Hitler to draw in the widest possible audience.
Reflecting on how his Academy Award-winning breakthrough film and seminal satirical comedy came to be, Brooks shared that Levine had used the money he’d made from “possibly the worst movie ever made, Hercules Unchained,” to invest in The Producers, but he still wasn’t sold on the prospect of a first-timer taking the reins.
“When I met Joseph E Levine, he was making Hercules, and that was a big hit,” Brooks offered. “And Hercules Unchained, and then Hercules Nearly Chained, but Roped. I don’t know; he had a lot of Hercules pictures with chains. And he was making some money. So Levine says, ‘I’ll do it, but who are we going to get to direct it?’ And I said, ‘Me’. And he said, ‘Oh, no, you’ve never directed a picture.'”
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He eventually relented and even gave Brooks final cut. As you might have guessed, Hercules Nearly Chained, but Roped isn’t a real movie, but Hercules Unchained was. Whether it’s the worst of all time remains the EGOT-winning centenarian’s personal opinion, but what can’t be denied is that it was a big hit. In fact, it was such a big hit that it was directly responsible for his Oscar-winning debut.
It was the second and last time Reeves played the title character, bringing in $500,000 in its opening weekend in America, and it ended 1960 as the third-highest-grossing release in the United Kingdom, which included a record-breaking bow in 36 of the 39 theatres in which it played. All things considered, not a bad return for Brooks’ pick for the worst picture ever committed to celluloid, especially when it also gave him everything he’d dreamed of.
