Mel Brooks uses bad taste rather as you and I would pass the salt. The Twelve Chairs is basically an unjustifiable nonsense, done in Yugoslavia on the cheap side …, presumably after The Producers and before Blazing Saddles. Set in a Brooksian notion of post-revolutionary Russia, it agitates itself about fellows chasing up a dozen gilt chairs in the hope of disembowelling the one that contains a tsar's ransom in jewels…. Mr Brooks, who almost wrecks the outing by turning up too successfully in it himself, as a masochistic ex-valet and all-purpose serf …, has thoughtfully written a flabby role which comes over as improvised as silly putty left to its own devices. (pp. 418-19)