The Twelve Chairs (1970) - film review

In 1923, Ippolit Matveevich Vorobyaninov is summoned to his mother’s deathbed in Soviet Russia.  Before she dies, the old woman tells her son that, during the Bolshevik Revolution, she concealed jewels of inestimable value in one of her twelve dining room chairs.  Vorobyaninov is overcome with emotion.  Since the fall of Imperial Russia, he has lived in poverty, his days of wealth and privilege now but a distant memory.  As Vorobyaninov begins his quest to find the lost chair, he meets Ostap Bender, a young swindler who wastes no time coercing him into making him a partner in his venture.   Unfortunately, Vorobyaninov and Bender are not alone in their search.  The priest who gave the Last Rites to Vorobyaninov’s mother is also keen to get his hands on the priceless jewels...

"Hope for the best, but expect the worst", trills the title song to this film. It’s the kind of advice that every filmmaker should give to his audience in the opening credits, but it seems particularly apt for films from the Mel Brooks stable.  After The Producers, a brilliantly observed and hilarious satire on the mad world that is Broadway, Brooks immediately directed what is widely considered his weakest film, a treasure hunt farce set in the Soviet Union.  Based on a well-known novel by Ilya Ilf and Yevgeni Petrov, The Twelve Chairs combines slapstick with Brooks’s trademark wry humour.  Unfortunately, genuine laughs are very few and far between, and the film is more likely to offend than please.

The film fails not because it is badly made or badly acted, but simply because the script doesn’t have enough in-built stamina to stay the course.  The best gags are used up in the first half hour; by the end Brooks and his team are really scraping the bottom of the barrel to find something for us to laugh at.  To his credit, Brooks gives the best comedy performance in the film, not that he has much in the way of competition.  Frank Langella is so camp he looks as though he should be presenting home makeover programmes for television.  Meanwhile, Ron Moody’s idea of comedy appears to be to over-act, roll his eyes and do silly voices.  The Twelve Chairs is mildly entertaining if you are in the right mood, but no way does it match up to the comedy classics that Mel Brooks would subsequently go on to make.

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