The Twelve Chairs (1970 film)

The Twelve Chairs (1970 film)
The Twelve Chairs is a 1970 American comedy film directed and written by Mel Brooks and starring Frank Langella, Ron Moody, and Dom DeLuise. The film is one of at least eighteen film adaptations of the Russian 1928 novel The Twelve Chairs by Ilf and Petrov.
Upon its release, The Twelve Chairs was received positively by critics, and is one of Brooks's favorite movies that he made.
Plot
In the Soviet Union in 1927, Ippolit Matveyevich Vorobyaninov, an impoverished aristocrat from Imperial Russia now working as a local village bureaucrat, is summoned to the deathbed of his mother-in-law. She reveals before dying that a fortune in jewels had been hidden from the Bolsheviks by being sewn into the seat cushion of one of the twelve chairs from the family's dining room set. After hearing the dying woman's confession, the Russian Orthodox priest Father Fyodor, who had arrived to administer the last rites, decides to abandon the Church and attempt to steal the treasure for himself. Shortly afterwards in the town of Stargorod, where Vorobyaninov's former mansion is located, a homeless con-artist, Ostap Bender, meets the dispossessed nobleman and manipulates his way into a partnership in his search for the family riches.
The chairs, along with all other private property, had been appropriated by the State after the Russian Revolution. Vorobyaninov and Bender set off together to locate the chairs and recover the fortune, but are stymied by a series of false leads and other trying events. They find that the chairs have been split up and sold individually. Therefore, their hunt requires a great deal of travel to track down and open up each piece of the set in order to eliminate it as a possible location of the booty. As they progress, they meet comrades from every walk of life in Soviet Russian society, transforming the film into a satirical send up of failing Communism.
By posing as the official in charge of the Department of Chairs, Bender tricks Father Fyodor into a wild goose chase to recover a similar set of eleven chairs in the possession of an engineer in a remote province in Siberia. Father Fyodor makes the long journey only to be thrown out of the engineer's house. When the engineer is reassigned to a post on the Black Sea, Fyodor follows him and buys the counterfeit chairs (on the condition that the engineer and his wife never see him again). He finds that none of the chairs has the jewels. Later, he runs across Vorobyaninov and Bender after they have retrieved one chair from a circus, and while being chased by them frantically climbs with the chair straight up the side of a mountain. After finding out that this chair doesn't contain the jewels, he finds that he is unable to get down again without help. Vorobyaninov and Bender leave him to his fate.
After traveling many miles and perpetrating numerous cons to pay for the lengthy enterprise, the two men return to Moscow where they discover the last chair; because the others contained no hidden treasure, this one must contain it all. It is located in a Palace of Culture, which is inconvenient due to the presence of so many witnesses. Vorobyaninov and Bender return after closing time, entering through a window Bender secretly had unlocked earlier.
At the moment of discovery, Bender carefully and quietly opens the chair cushion with his knife, but their hopes are dashed as it is found to be completely empty. Vorobyaninov is stunned and angry, but Bender laughs at the absurdity of the situation. A watchman finds them, and Vorobyaninov demands to know what happened to the jewels. "Look around you," the watchman answers, explaining that after the jewels were accidentally found, they were used to finance construction of the grand building in which they stand. Driven into a sudden rage, Vorobyaninov smashes the chair to pieces and assaults the officer whom the watchman has summoned. After admonishing him for hitting a policeman, Bender leads the way and they escape into the night.
At the end of his patience, demoralized and bankrupted, Bender proposes that he and Vorobyaninov go their separate ways. In a desperate attempt to keep Bender from leaving, Vorobyaninov flings the remains of the last chair into the air, and collapses to the ground feigning an epileptic seizure; this is an act they had previously rehearsed as part of a con. Attracted by the crowd and understanding what Vorobyaninov is doing, Bender calls for the crowd's attention and begs the passers-by to give generously to this sad and stricken man. Using simple gestures without uttering a word, the two men cement their partnership in crime.
Cast
Ron Moody as Ippolit Matveyevich Vorobyaninov
Frank Langella as Ostap Bender
Dom DeLuise as Father Fyodor
Andreas Voutsinas as Nikolai Sestrin
Diana Coupland as Madame Bruns
David Lander as Engineer Bruns
Vlada Petric as Sevitsky
Elaine Garreau as Claudia Ivanovna
Robert Bernal as Curator
Will Stampe as Night watchman
Mel Brooks as Tikon
Production
Development
Throughout the 1950s and 60s, director Mel Brooks would meet with a gourmet society, consisting of Mario Puzo, Joseph Heller, Speed Vogel, Julius "Julie" Green and Brooks, every Tuesday night in Chinatown. Brooks was introduced to the club by its founder, Vogel, who established it alongside Zero Mostel - who collaborated with Brooks, playing the lead role of Max Bialystock in Brooks's 1967 film The Producers, and also worked with Vogel at a building for artisans. During one of the club's meetings, likely in 1968, Green gave Brooks his copy of the Russian novel The Twelve Chairs, the first of three books written by Ilf and Petrov, and told Brooks that it could possibly work as a movie. Brooks was sceptical at first, but changed his mind after reading it.
Brooks decided the movie needed a title song and considered hiring a songwriter to write the lyrics. His then-wife, Anne Bancroft, successfully convinced Brooks to write it himself, who reminded him of the fact that he made The Producers and wrote its main songs, "Springtime for Hitler" and "Prisoners of Love". He got the idea for the song's title, "Hope for the Best, Expect for the Worst", from the movie's Russian setting, and based the song's melody off of a Johannes Brahms composition, Hungarian Dances Number 4 in B Minor, which was in turn based on the csárdás "Bártfai emlék", composed by Béla Kéler. The song's first eight bars are taken directly from the composition, but the interlude and the release are original.
The novel has Vorobyaninov murdering Bender upon discovering the final chair. Brooks was firm on changing this, stating in an interview with the online magazine Consequence that he "was never gonna keep that. If you’re gonna sit through two hours of a movie, you better have a satisfying ending. I’m not gonna leave you with a bad taste in your mouth, because popcorn’s bad enough. You don’t need to go out depressed after an hour or two of seeing a movie. [...] I was always going to have Ostap see the light and come to the aid and rescue of poor Vorobyaninov. So, that was my switch on it. For me, it worked better."
Casting
Brooks initially wanted Alastair Sim as Vorobyaninov, Albert Finney as Ostap Bender and Peter Sellers as Father Fyodor, but none of them could make it for the movie. Brooks then wanted Gene Wilder to play Vorobyaninov. Wilder, however, thought he was too young for the part, and told Brooks that the part of Vorobyaninov required "somebody who has gone through life a little bit, and you could see it in his face." Brooks agreed. Looking for a replacement for Fyodor, Bancroft saw Dom DeLuise on television and recommended him to Brooks. The two's first meeting lasted four and a half hours. Recalling the event, DeLuise said of it: "Mr. Brooks said that Peter Sellers was supposed to play this part, but even if he did, we would be friends forever." Bancroft introduced Brooks to Frank Langella, who worked with her on the stage drama A Cry with Players and an experimental stage adaptation of The Skin of Our Teeth. Langella assisted Brooks with the casting of Ostap by helping him name actors to potentially play the part. Brooks eventually gave up and told Langella: "Oh, the hell with it. You do it." Langella took Brooks to a showing of Oliver!, which starred Ron Moody as Fagin. Langella told Brooks "There’s your Vorobyaninov."
Filming
Principal photography for the film took place in Yugoslavia, primarily in the Belgrade region, including the present-day Croatian city, Dubrovnik, from 25 August to mid November 1969. Production began at Kosutnjak Studios in Belgrade, where Brooks was initially given a crew of eighty people. Brooks negotiated with the Yugoslav government, and was given a crew of one thousand Yugoslavs to assist him. The crew could not understand what Brooks would say on set because he only knew English. With the tremendous amount of crew members working on the movie, Brooks felt as though he was David Lean filming Lawrence of Arabia. One day, during filming in Dubrovnik of a scene where DeLuise destroys some of the chairs, Brooks could not get a proper shot with the camera. Out of frustration, Brooks threw his director's chair into the Adriatic Sea. This got the film crew furious so they stopped working and threatened to strike. Confused, Brooks asked the cinematographer, Djordje Nikolic, why this was happening, to which Nikolic responded in a whisper: "You’ve just thrown the people’s chair into the Adriatic. This is a communist country. Everything belongs to the people. The cameras, the celluloid. You’re making a people’s picture." Brooks replied: "Tell them I profoundly apologize for hurling the people’s chair into the Adriatic. I’ll never do that again. And I’d like to extend my profound regrets." After reconciling with the crew, they all toasted to Vinjak and got drunk, spending the rest of the day carousing and kissing each other. Brooks said he "learned to respect the people's chair."
Brooks had an energetic way of directing. A tree obstructed the view of a shot, so he tried to pull it out of the ground. In a scene where Langella was instructed to row a boat across the moonlight, he went so far out into the ocean that, at three in the morning, Brooks had to enter the ocean himself and swim to find him. Being of Russian Jew descent, Brooks relished his time in Yugoslavia and felt like he had come home, and called the filming of the movie a "great, great adventure."
Langella fell while picking up Moody in the filming of a scene, cutting his buttocks. While recovering in bed, DeLuise entered his room dressed as a nurse, and said to him: "How do you do? I'm Nurse DeLuise. I'm here to tend your wounds." Langella was paid a very low amount of money, humorously stating he was paid "about 45 cents to do the movie."
Release
Reception
The Twelve Chairs received generally positive reviews from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, it has a 93% approval score based on 14 reviews, with an average rating of 6.7/10.
Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote: "For some reason, this sort of comedy of physical insult seemed much funnier to me in the Broadway world of The Producers, which is really aggressive and nasty and cheap, than in a Russia that is not too far removed from the world of Sholem Aleichem." Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four stars out of four and wrote that, while "you do laugh a lot ... It's not going for the laughs alone. It has something to say about honor among thieves, and by the end of the film we can sense a bond between the two main characters that is even, amazingly, human." Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune also gave the film four stars out of four, finding that it was not only funny but remarkable for "the quality of [Brooks's] direction, not even considering that The Twelve Chairs is only his second film. Brooks is in complete control of the many film techniques—visual and dramatic—he employs: slow motion, speed-ups and sight gags clearly borrowed from the silent era." Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times wrote that "despite some nicely farcical and stylized moments—many of them provided by Brooks himself in a cameo role as a drunken servant—the movie's first half isn't strong enough to override a thin and disappointing second half." Gary Arnold of The Washington Post found the film "much more consistent and fluid than Brooks' first film, The Producers. You don't gyrate as wildly between inspired and mediocre bits, but the 'wild' bits, the idees fixes,are still there, performed brilliantly by Moody and DeLuise and Brooks himself." Richard Combs of The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote that Dom DeLuise "simpers and slavers to great effect as the piously greedy Father Fyodor ... DeLuise, in fact, considerably outshines the two leads." John Simon said The Twelve Chairs "is a model of how not to make a comedy."
Brooks has considered The Twelve Chairs to be an exceptional work of his, ranking it with The Producers and Life Stinks as the movies he is most proud of having made, and one that more people should watch.
Box office
The film opened at the Tower East in New York and the Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles, grossing $40,000 in its first week.
Awards
Langella won the National Board of Review award for Best Supporting Actor. Brooks was nominated by the Writers Guild of America for Best Comedy Adapted from Another Medium.
References
External links
1970 films
1970 comedy films
American comedy films
Films scored by John Morris
Films based on Russian novels
Films directed by Mel Brooks
Films set in 1927
Films set in Russia
Ilf and Petrov
Films with screenplays by Mel Brooks
Films shot in Yugoslavia
1970s English-language films
1970s American films