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 Soviet 1928 novel The Twelve Chairs by Ilf and Petrov.
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.
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 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, and tries to kill himself. 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 the chair never contains the jewels, he finds that he is unable to get down again without help. Vorobyaninov and Bender leave him to his fate.
Vorobyaninov and Bender return to Moscow where they discover the last chair, which is located in a recreational centre for railway workers, 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. Bender carefully and quietly opens the chair cushion, only to be found empty. A watchman finds them and Vorobyaninov demands to know what happened to the jewels. The watchman explains that the jewels they accidentally found was used to finance construction of the recreation centre. 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.
The next day, Bender proposes that he and Vorobyaninov go their separate ways, since they are already targeted by the authorities. 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, a con they used during their travels. 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. Using simple gestures, the two men cement their partnership in crime.
Director Mel Brooks met with a gourmet society consisting of Mario Puzo, Joseph Heller, Speed Vogel, and Julius Green every Tuesday night in Chinatown, Manhattan throughout the 1950s and 1960s. During a club meeting, 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 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 wife, Anne Bancroft, successfully convinced Brooks to write it himself, reminding him that he wrote The Producers and its songs. 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 on 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. According to Brooks, 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 did not want the movie to end in a depressing manner, and thought the ending worked better for him.
Brooks wanted Alastair Sim as Vorobyaninov, Albert Finney as Ostap Bender and Peter Sellers as Father Fyodor, but they were all unavailable. Brooks asked Gene Wilder to play Vorobyaninov, but Wilder disagreed and thought he was too young for the part, telling Brooks that the role of Vorobyaninov should be played by a man who looks aged. 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."
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 given a crew of either eighty or one thousand people after negotiating with the Yugoslav government. The crew could not understand what Brooks would say on set because he only knew English. During filming in Dubrovnik of a scene where DeLuise destroys some of the chairs, Brooks, frustrated by a difficult shot, threw his director's chair into the Adriatic Sea. This infuriated the film crew, who 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 directing style. 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."
The Twelve Chairs received generally positive reviews from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, it has an 87% approval score based on 15 reviews, with an average rating of 6.6/10.
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.
The film opened at the Tower East in New York and the Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles, grossing $40,000 in its first week.
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.