|
The material, previously essayed by Fred Allen and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, gives the clearest indication of Mel Brooks the closet scholar. (The august chorus over the credits lays out the philosophy: "Hope for the best, expect the worst/The world's a stage, we're unrehearsed...") The Revolution can't change human greed but it can sure expose it, the treasure hunt in 1927 Russia puts ruined aristocrat (Ron Moody), strapping sharpie (Frank Langella) and corrupt cleric (Dom DeLuise) after a fortune hidden inside a lavish twelve-chair set. "Haven't you heard? There's no private property in the Soviet Union." Brooks as the sozzled serf can only yearn for his old master's slaps, statues of Dostoevsky and Lenin witness the withering farce from Moscow to Siberia and back. Moody has a gag out of Keaton—chasing after one of the precious chairs without letting go of the park bench he's sitting on—and later brings a Sternbergian intensity to the degradation of the deposed nobleman feigning epilepsy for rubles. (Paired with the younger cynic better equipped for the changing times, he evokes Dalio on the road in Grand Illusion.) By contrast, DeLuise is a one-man caravan of whimpers and squeals and giggles, shorn of orthodox beard and cassock until his avaricious journey strands him on a craggy mountaintop: "Oh Lord, you're so strict!" Freeze before an audience yet dazzle on a tightrope, so it goes in the "Bureau of Bureaus" labyrinth, and what good are rolling European hills if you can't stage undercranked slapstick on them? Andreas Voutsinas is still the theatrical queen from The Producers, given Ivan the Terrible greasepaint for his latest opus, "The Rise and Fall of the Upper Classes: A Comic Spectacle." A key work for the graver side of Brooksian shtick, amply noted by Allen in Love and Death. With Diana Coupland, David Lander, and Elaine Garreau.
--- Fernando F. Croce |