The Director's Oeuvre: Mel Brooks - The Twelve Chairs

While everybody emphasizes the importance of a director's first film, I believe that the second film is more important.  With your first film, you cut your teeth.  With your second film, and a larger budget, you prove your worth.  Quentin Tarantino followed 'Reservoir Dogs' with Pulp Fiction' and Steven Spielberg followed 'The Sugarland Express' with 'Jaws' while Marc Webb followed '(500) Days of Summer' with 'The Amazing Spider-man' (sigh).

This brings us to 'The Twelve Chairs', Mel Brooks' sophomore effort, in which he trades strong characters and clever dialogue for scale, and loses at every turn.

Based on a famous Russian novel of the same name, the movie follows three greedy men as they search high and low, racing back and forth across Russia to get their hands on twelve gold-encrusted chairs, one of which contains a fortune of jewels.

Ron Moody plays Vorobyaninov, an aristocrat wiped out by the communist revolution.  When the movie begins, his dying mother-in-law tells him that she has hidden her valuables from the Bolsheviks by sewing them inside one of her ornate chairs.  Desperate to return to his old way of life, Vorobyaninov sets out to retrieve the chair.

A clever, handsome, and homeless conman named Ostap Bender, played by a young Frank Langella deduces Vorobyaninov's true intentions and the pair are off to find the treasure.  Dom DeLuise plays a local priest who abandons his post to join the hunt but he's mostly there to pad out the runtime.

Mel Brooks is featured front and center in the poster and yet he is barely in the film.  Ironically, though I've never been a great fan of Brooks as an actor, he's the best part of this movie by far.  It's a shame that he couldn't be the main character, or even a bumbling sidekick for more than five minutes.

The Twelve Chairs is an uneasy film.  It's not what you would call messy, just uninspired and unmotivated.  It is based on an old Russian novel of the same name.  Apparently this is one of 18 different adaptations.  I can only assume that Brooks decided to do the comedic version of the story but he only half commits.  Often the style feels amateur and unsure.  Not since Benny Hill have I seen so much sped up footage in one comedy.  I can only assume its because the footage was too slow, so they ratched up the tempo and added a lot of "whoop whoop" noises to make it funny.  The cinematography is decent and the locations are certainly beautiful but Brooks never gives us a moment to appreciate it.  He's in such a hurry to make this feel like some sort of 'Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World' type caper that he fails to involve us in the characters, the mystery, or the world around them.

I can't say I ever felt anything for the characters.  I never wanted them to succeed, I just hoped that maybe this chair would be the fabled chair and the story would be over with.  Eventually, I grew frustrated with Vorobyaninov and Ostap as human beings and with Mel Brooks as a storyteller.  At no point do Moody and Langella ever compliment one another as a team.  Bender has a plan.  Vorobyaninov can't contain himself and does something stupid.  Bender restrains him or saves him and thinks of a new plan.  Wash, rinse, repeat.

Without strong characters or compelling relationships, comedies rely on exceptional set pieces.  The Twelve Chairs certainly has set pieces, it rushes from one scenario to the next, but every single scene is unfulfilled and they all feel abandoned, as though Brooks lost confidence half way through and jumped ship.  There is a fun scene at a circus involving a high wire act but like every other scene, it lacks the proper build up and pay off.  Everything about this movie is a creative anomaly and the word "funny" is merely conceptual.  Mel Brooks was a comedian and a drummer before he was a filmmaker.  He knows the importance of rhythm.  And yet this movie exists in a race to finish itself.  It's in a hurry to cease being.