The Twelve Chairs | | Cast : | Mel Brooks | | Director : | Mel Brooks | | Studio : | Image Entertainment | | Format : | Color, Widescreen | | Released Date : | October 28, 1970 | | DVD Released Date : | May 09, 2000 | | Language : | English (Dubbed), English (Original Language) | | Audience Rating : | G (General Audience) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | June 21, 2005 | | Summary | Not Mel's Best---but right up there | Content
 | Seeing the films Mel Brooks has directed in recent years, it is hard to understand where he lost his muse. His early works are full of genius and uniformly well-cast. The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein are all classics today. The Twelve Chairs should be, for it rates with those other three as a film of comic genius.
The plot is set in the 1920's USSR and does a masterful job of skewering the Soviet system while capturing the flavor of Russia. Ron Moody is a deposed nobleman whose dying mother tells him that she hid the family jewels in a set of dining room chairs. As Moody hunts them down, he inadvertently teams up with drifter and opportunist Frank Langella. The villain is Father Fyodor (Dom deLuise), an Orthodox priest who hears about the wealth in mama's deathbed confession, and then cuts off his whiskers and joins the scavenger hunt.
Moody is great in the madcap role he plays as former Marshal Vorobyaninov. His legs-all-akimbo, owlish countenance is ideal. Langella's character is a pathologically mendacious delight. Dom deLuise overacts a bit and is somewhat intrusive. Mel Brooks himself has a modest cameo as Tikhon, the Marshal's old servant, waxing nostalgic for the good ole days when he could enjoy being slapped around by the nobility.
There's sometimes touchingly artistic cinematography, good pacing, and a neat soundtrack combining everything from the Internationale to the Brooks-written title song "Hope for the Best."
If the film has a flaw, it's that towards the end it gets a bit too serious and loses the madcap edge that the jerkily-fast-photographed chase scenes gave it early on. But that's the only star off the top for this gem.
Well worth the price and a good addition to your collection! |
| Rating | | | Date | May 01, 2005 | | Summary | Something a person can watch without fastforwarding | Content
| This is one of those movies that we all wish there were more of: movies that the youngest and oldest members of the family can watch together without having to distract, cover the ears or eyes of anyone or fastforwarding.
This movie made my entire family laugh so hard that we ached the next day. IT is definitely an overlooked gem of a film that really deserves to be in the film library at home. A wonderful, hilarious and even touching film. We love it. |
| Rating | | | Date | April 17, 2004 | | Summary | One of Brooks's best | Content
| For my money, the best Mel Brooks movies are those in which he appears the least or not at all. It's not that I don't think that he isn't a brilliant comedic actor: he is. But my top three Mel Brooks movies are THE PRODUCERS, THE TWELVE CHAIRS, and YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN. Although he does have a few minutes on film in this movie, they're brief and effective. But he never comes close to stealing the scene from Ron Moody, Frank Langella or Dom DeLuise--and all three of these actors are perfect in their roles. DeLuise is at his best here, and Moody, with his Trotsky looks and high strung personality is hysterical.THE TWELVE CHAIRS is brilliant historical spoof of strong materialism in a place where no one is to have possessions: post-Revolutionary Russia. But humans will be humans, and the desire for comfort and money will always be with us, I'm afraid. But this isn't a morality film. It's huge fun, great satire, and loaded with an understanding of humanity. |
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