There he meets his former moronic servant (Mel Brooks), now the caretaker for the home, who has come under the influence of smarty-pants street hustler Ostap Bender ( Frank Langella ). travels from his tiny village to Moscow, where his family mansion was before it was confiscated by the Soviets and turned into an old age home for women.
His dying mother-in-law confesses on her deathbed to her son-in-law and the corrupt local Russian Orthodox priest Father Fyodor ( Dom DeLuise) that to save her valuable diamonds and jewels from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution she sewed them in one of her twelve custom-made English dining chairs. In the Russia of 1927, the aging former count during the Tsarist days, Vorobyaninov, (Ron Moody), has been impoverished and works as a lowly license clerk under the new communist regime. The premise was so good that I expected the frantic pic to be funnier and not so overwrought. Brooks provides a few hilarious madcap moments thanks to Dom DeLuise’s wacky over-the-top performance, but by the time the search for the valuable jewels winds down to the last chair the pic has run out of gas.
There were several film versions of The Twelve Chairs, with the 1945 “In the Bag” Hollywood one with Fred Allen and the 1936 “Keep Your Seats Please” British version among the better ones (others include versions from Germany, Cuba and Argentina). Mel Brooks (“The Producers”/”Blazing Saddles”/” Young Frankenstein” ) directs, writes and appears in his mean-spirited slapstick farce version of the 1928 Russian novel by Ilya Ilf & Yevgeni Petrov. “ The premise was so good that I expected the frantic pic to be funnier and not so overwrought.
TWELVE CHAIRS, THE (director/writer: Mel Brooks screenwriter: from the novel by Ilya Ilf & Yevgeni Petrov cinematographer: Djordje Nikolic editor: Alan Heim music: John Morris cast: Mel Brooks (Tikon), Ron Moody ( Ippolit Vorobyaninov ), Frank Langella (Ostap Bender), Dom DeLuise ( Father Fyodor ), Andreas Voutsinas ( Nikolai Sestrin ), Vlada Petric ( Sevitsky ), David Lander ( Engineer Bruns), Diana Coupland ( Madame Bruns), Elaine Garreau (Claudia Ivanovna) Runtime: 94 MPAA Rating: GP producer: Michael Hertzberg 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment 1970)
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