The Twelve Chairs is a 1970 American comedy film directed and written by Mel Brooks, and starring Frank Langella, Ron Moody and Dom DeLuise.
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 a fortune in jewels had been hidden from the Bolsheviks by being sewn into the seat cushion of one of the twelve chairs from the family's dining room set.
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 riches.
Vorobyaninov and Bender set off together to locate the chairs and recover the fortune, but are stymied by a series of false leads and other trying events.
Therefore, their hunt requires a great deal of travel to track down and open up each piece of the set in order to eliminate it as a possible location of the booty.
Vorobyaninov and Bender return to Moscow where they discover the last chair, which is located in a recreational centre for railway workers, which is inconvenient due to the presence of so many witnesses.
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 feigning an epileptic seizure, a con they used during their travels.
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.
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.
[3] Brooks wanted Alastair Sim as Vorobyaninov, Albert Finney as Ostap Bender and Peter Sellers as Father Fyodor, but they were all unavailable.
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."
"[6][5] 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.
[7][2][3][8] 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.
Brooks is in complete control of the many film techniques—visual and dramatic—he employs: slow motion, speed-ups and sight gags clearly borrowed from the silent era.
"[19] Brooks has considered The Twelve Chairs to be an exceptional work of his, ranking it with The Producers and Life Stinks as the movies he is most proud of having made,[5] and one that more people should watch.