What a farce it all is . . . this little spot of black sogginess is a reconcentrado pen, with a dead line outside, beyond which everything living is shot . . . Upon arrival, I found 30 cases of smallpox, and average fresh ones of five a day, which practically have to be turned out to die.
22.
The more critical and negative reviews partly targeted the directorial style and broad ethnic humor, but also commonly noted the bad taste and insensitivity of devising a broad comedy about two Jews conspiring to cheat theatrical investors by devising a designed-to-fail tasteless Broadway musical about Hitler only 23 years after the end of World War II . Among the most harsh critics were Stanley Kauffmann in " The New Republic, " who wrote that " the film bloats into sogginess " and Pauline Kael who called it " amateurishly crude " in " The New Yorker ."
