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Three Minor Masterworks by Mel Brooks

Mel Brooks is one of America’s most beloved comedians and directors.

Since 1968, he has been creating a succession of comic works that have provided no end of laughs for those who see them.

While his best known works are still wildly popular and well-remembered nearly 40 years after their release, it’s worth noting that some of his films, lesser-known but in many ways just as funny and interesting, have received relatively little attention over the years.

The Twelve Chairs (1970), High Anxiety (1977) and Life Stinks (1991) are three Mel Brooks comedies that take a slightly different approach than his big hits, but are very rewarding and fun to watch on their own terms. Here, then, are three Mel Brooks comedies you may not have heard of, but are well worth checking out.

Coming on the heels of his 1968 film, The Producers, The Twelve Chairs is a comparatively low-key comedy in many respects.

Based on a Russian satirical novel by Ilf and Petrov, Brooks’ film focuses on the efforts of former nobleman Ippolit Vorobyaninov (Ron Moody) to reclaim his family fortune in jewels, which have been sewn the seat of one of a dozen identical chairs that were scattered throughout Russian after the revolution. He teams up with a charming con artist named Bender (Frank Langella) to track them down. Their misadventures take them across the countryside, pursued by a greedy priest (Dom DeLuise) who wants the jewels for himself.

The Twelve Chairs suffers from the lack of charismatic performances that made Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder such a delight in The Producers.

While Moody and Langella lack the chemistry of those two, they still manage to create funny and, by the end of the film, quite touching portrayals that reveal much depth to their characters beyond the broad types they come across as when we are first introduced to them. Dom DeLuise, on the other hand, plays every scene at a fever-pitch, and while he is always a delight to watch, fails to capture the depth portrayed in the two protagonists.

Like its predecessor, The Twelve Chairs was an extremely low-budget affair that received only limited distribution.

While it lacks the strong comic structure of The Producers, it is in many ways a more interesting work technically. The film was shot in Yugoslavia and demonstrates Brooks’ skill as a visual stylist. Brooks also allows himself a supporting part, as the former servant to Vorobyaninov, reacting in delight when his former master slaps him around just like the old days. The film is fairly unknown to even many confirmed Brooks fans, and has only relatively recently become easily accessible through home video channels. Remarkably, the film maintains much of the strong social satire of the original novel, and demonstrates that – had he wanted – Brooks was just as capable of making comedy out of “highbrow” sources as the other major comic filmmaker of that generation, Woody Allen.

A lot happened between The Twelve Chairs and High Anxiety, a spoof of Alfred Hitchcock’s films. First of all, Brooks had two major hits in 1974 – Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein – that catapulted to superstardom as a filmmaker. In 1976, he wrote, directed and starred in the unconventional and highly original Silent Movie, which unfortunately fell flat in many respects as a comedy, but cannot be denied its place as one of the most unique comedies in the last 50 years. Some critics felt that Brooks’ decision to star in his own films was a mistake.

In High Anxiety, though, Brooks is perfectly cast as Dr. Richard H. Thorndyke, who is called in to take over as head of a mental institution where he is perhaps the only sane character.  Supported by a brilliant supporting cast including Madeleine Kahn, Harvey Korman, Cloris Leachman, Howard Morris and Ron Carey. Brooks does a remarkable job at holding together the utterly crazy characters that come and go throughout the film. The film was not a hit on the scale of either Blazing Saddles or Young Frankenstein, or even Silent Movie.

It is possible that after Silent Movie, which is definitely not a film for all tastes, audiences were a little skeptical of Brooks’ next project.

By tackling the films of Hitchcock, Brooks was once again working from a familiar model that audiences were familiar with – just as he had with the Western in Blazing Saddles, and the horror film in Young Frankenstein. In re-creating a number of Hitchcock’s most famous set-pieces for his parody, Brooks also gets a chance to demonstrate his own skills as a filmmaker.

While the film has never been one of Brooks’ most popular works, it has its fans, and holds up as one of his more enjoyable, if lesser-known, titles.

Brooks’ work in the 1980s geared forward into out-and-out parody with History of the World Part I and Spaceballs, with an acting turn in To Be Or Not To Be in between the two.

When Brooks made Life Stinks in 1991, he once again returned to the smaller, slightly more subtle approach he had taken with The Twelve Chairs back in 1970. Once again, the resulting film was a commercial flop, but like The Twelve Chairs, Life Stinks reveals a deeper side to Brooks’ comedy that is unexpected but rewarding if given the chance.

In the film, Brooks plays Goddard Bolt, a seemingly heartless tycoon who accepts a bet from a rival (Jeffrey Tambor) that he can’t survive on the mean streets of Los Angeles for a month. Accepting the bet, the film follows Bolt’s efforts to find food, shelter, friendship and even romance, discovering his own humanity in the process.

The premise immediately recalls Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels, but Brooks’ film keeps the social satire on the light side.

There is a final twist, as his reformed tycoon returns to his old company to announce he has won the bet – and finds out that the whole thing was a scheme on the part of his rival to get him out of the way in order to buy out his company. Bolt succeeds in setting things straight but in the process has learned a more important lesson about things that are more valuable than money.

In between his more raucous parodies, these three films, while in many ways minor efforts, are still a must for any Brooks fan who wants to explore the different facets of his approaches to comedy.

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