The Twelve Chairs is a 1970 American slapstick comedy film directed by Mel Brooks, starring Frank Langella, Dom DeLuise and Ron Moody. The screenplay was written by Brooks. The film is loosely based on a Russian 1928 novel The Twelve Chairs by Ilf and Petrov. The novel had been previously filmed as Keep Your Seats Please by Ealing Studios in 1936 starring George Formby and It's in the Bag! as a starring vehicle for Fred Allen. In the Soviet Union in 1927, Ippolit Matveevich Vorobyaninov , an impoverished aristocrat from Imperial Russia, is summoned, along with the village priest, to the... deathbed of his mother in law. She reveals, before passing, 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 has arrived to give the Last Rites, decides to abandon the Church and attempt to steal the treasure.
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