If you're a Mel Brooks fan but have somehow overlooked this one, you owe yourself a rare pleasure.
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This is the film that usually slips through the cracks. Ask people to name comedies by Mel Brooks, and they'll probably answer "Young Frankenstein," "Blazing Saddles," "History of the World," "High Anxiety," "Silent Movie," "Spaceballs," maybe "The Producers," "Life Stinks," "Robin Hood: Men in Tights" and "Dracula: Dead and Loving It." I'd be willing to bet, though, that almost no one would remember "The Twelve Chairs." Written, directed, and performed by Brooks and only his second film, it's a delight from beginning to end. Yet "The Twelve Chairs" is the one that got away, and a shame it is. I hope its appearance on DVD will help rectify the situation.
"The Twelve Chairs" is not a typical Brooks film, not a parody of any other art form, and not a satire, unless you count its constant pokes at Mankind's greed. Certainly, it uses a string of gags like most Brooks films, but the gags are mostly visual this time, not verbal. Slapstick is the order of the day, some of it broad, a little of it subtle.
The story, too, is atypical of Brooks. He adapted it from an early twentieth-century novel by two Soviet journalists, Ilya Ilf and Yevgenni Petrov, the same novel, in fact, that inspired "It's in the Bag" with Fred Allen and Jack Benny in 1945 and "12 + 1" with Sharon Tate and Orson Welles the same year Brooks did his version, 1970.
Set in Russia in 1927, the story stars Ron Moody ("Oliver!") as an impoverished former nobleman named Vorobyaninov, down on his luck since the Revolution took away his lands, servants, house, and money. But on his mother-in-law's deathbed he learns that she had sewn the family jewels into one of twelve dining room chairs. The trouble is, the chairs were long ago confiscated by the State, and before anyone can lay hands on them they are scattered all over the country.
Dom DeLuise costars as Father Fyodor, an avaricious priest who learns of the treasure while taking the old lady's final confession. The two immediately set upon a competition to beat the other to the chairs.
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