Friday, September 6, 2013

The Twelve Chairs

On her deathbed, an old Russian woman reveals to both her son-in-law (Ron Moody) and her priest (Dom DeLuise) that she has sewn a small fortune of jewels into the seat of one chair of a twelve piece set which, as luck would have it, has been dispersed across a vast expanse of the empire. Working against the priest, the son-in-law, a hapless nobleman, is joined by a shifty con artist (Frank Langella) on his wild goose chase. The Twelve Chairs is an often humorous and occasionally meandering early film from Mel Brooks who adapted, of all things, a 1928 Russian novel. The film features hilarious performances from DeLuise and especially Moody.