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.
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 she had sewn the family's jewels into the seat cushion of one of the twelve chairs from the family's dining room set to prevent the Bolsheviks from getting them. 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's riches. Together, they learn from Vorobyaninov’s former servant, Tikon, that eleven of the chairs, along with the rest of the estate, were seized by the state after the Russian Revolution.
Vorobyaninov returns to his old home and discovers Father Fyodor attempting to steal the remaining chair. In the ensuing struggle, the chair is torn open, revealing nothing, and Fyodor escapes. Posing as an official of the Department of Chairs, Bender tricks Fyodor into a wild goose chase to recover a similar set of eleven chairs in the possession of an engineer in Siberia. Fyodor makes the long journey by train to Irkutsk only to be thrown out of the engineer's house. When the engineer is reassigned to a post at Yalta 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), only to find them empty, and descends into aimless wandering.
Meanwhile, Vorobyaninov and Bender locate the eleven remaining chairs in a museum in Moscow, just as seven are taken away to be sold. The remaining four do not contain the jewels. One of the seven is bought by a stranger whom Vorobyaninov fails to catch. The other six are sold to a travelling theatre troupe, and, posing as actors, they manage to open three chairs before being interrupted. To keep up the ruse, Vorobyaninov agrees to perform in the troupe's play, but succumbs to stage fright, and he and Bender are thrown off the troupe's boat.
The two manage to reach Yalta, where the troupe docks next, and convince the manager's assistant, Sevitsky, to sell them the three remaining chairs for thirty rubles. Bender, inspired by a statue of Dostoyevsky, convinces Vorobyaninov to fake an epileptic seizure, compelling the townfolk to raise the money needed. The two buy two of the chairs from Sevitsky, who reveals he sold the third to a high rope performer at a circus. These two chairs also prove empty. After Vorobyaninov and Bender retrieve the chair from the circus, they encounter Father Fydor, who frantically climbs with the chair straight up the side of a mountain. After finding out that it 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.
Vorobyaninov and Bender return to Moscow, where they discover the last chair 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 had secretly 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 were used to finance the construction of the recreation centre. Driven into a sudden rage, Vorobyaninov smashes the chair to pieces and assaults an 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, once again feigning an epileptic seizure. 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, cementing 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 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 skeptical but changed his mind after reading it.
Brooks decided the movie needed a song over the opening titles, and considered hiring a songwriter to write the lyrics. His wife, Anne Bancroft, persuaded Brooks to write it himself by 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:
Casting 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 looked like he had seen life. 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 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 Jewish 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 he was 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 an 87% approval score based on 15 reviews, with an average rating of 6.6/10.