Twelve Chairs, The

This Mel Brooks comedy is pretty much forgotten about these days and for a very good reason; it’s simply not funny.

Made at a time when American screen comedy involved lots of silent era Keystone Kops type silliness, The Twelve Chairs is well within this territory and is really only of any interest today as an early screen appearance for Frank Langella, now better known as a celebrated stage actor and from such substantial films as Frost/Nixon (2008).

Written by Brooks and adapted from a popular 1928 Russian novel, the story involves three ill-assorted characters (Langella, Ron Moody, and Dom DeLuise) in the hunt for a cache of jewels hidden at the time of the Russian Revolution in one of a set of twelve dining chairs htat have since been dipersedsoldier . Joining him in the frantic search is a soldier turned con artist (Langella looking like a young Anthony Perkins) and a sleazy Orthodox priest Father Fyodor (DeLuise). Brooks plays the devoted man-servant of the aristocrat. 

A chase movie is a chase movie is a chase movie and this one predictably involves a lot of running around, literally and often in fast forward with lots of supposedly hilarious hi-jinx along the way. Fortunately Langella’s sober presence stops it from spiraling into wholesale inanity but even so it is direly predictable, with, typically for Brooks, a chuckleworthy gag or two.

Brooks has made more than his share of duds (as a film-maker he could have packed his bags after his first film, The Producers, in 1967) but in its day the film was well-received, perhaps not only because comedy standards were so low that DeLuise’s endless simperings could be regarded as amusing but because it was seen as a dig at Communist rhetoric. Unfortunately for Brooks neither of these considerations apply today.

FYI: Woody Allen no doubt studied Brooks' film for his own variant, 1975's Love and Death.

 

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