Anniversary of The Twelve Chairs

June 21 marks exactly 50 years since the release on the screens of Soviet cinemas of the film "The Twelve Chairs", directed by Leonid Gaidai and based on the novel of the same name by Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov. (For the sake of fairness, I note that sometimes another date for the premiere of this film is also specified - June 8. But let us trust Kinopoisk.)

In the first year of the screening of "The Twelve Chairs" was seen by over 39 million Soviet moviegoers. But this film was not honored with festival awards. Wikipedia, however, mentions the prize "For Contribution to the Development of the Genre of Comedy Films" at the 5th All-Union Film Festival in Tbilisi. But this prize was awarded not to the film, but to the director himself, and not for a separate film, but for a set of works, including the well-known "Operation 'Y' & Other Shurik's Adventures", "Kidnapping Caucassian Style, or Shurik's New Adventures", "The Diamond Arm" and others.

However, such a cool attitude of the communist leadership to the film by Leonid Gaidai is quite understandable and is largely determined by the attitude of the communist leadership of the country to the very original source - the novel by Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov. The novel, which appeared in the magazin "Thirty Days" in the first half of 1928, was greeted with deathly silence by Soviet literary criticism. Only after a warm assessment of the novel in Nikolai Bukharin's speech at a meeting of workers' and rural correspondents, which took place in December 1928, did a few cautious positive assessments of the novel appear.

But, as you know, a few years later Bukharin was declared an enemy of the people and shot. And the novel by Ilf and Petrov was banned in 1948. Persons involved in the publication of the novel were subject to penalties of varying degrees of severity. And until the mid-50s, before the beginning of the "Khrushchev thaw", the novel was banned. Perhaps it was these circumstances that "fueled" interest in the novel outside the borders of the Soviet Union, due to which several adaptations of it appeared. Russian film critic Yevgeny Nefedov notes that

"at least a dozen film versions of the book have been released all over the world (from Czechoslovakia to Great Britain, from Sweden to Cuba)."

To be honest, I have seen only one foreign film version - made by Mel Brooks literally a year before the release of Leonid Gaidai's film. But it's not about it today.

These are the events that preceded the release of the film "The Twelve Chairs" by Leonid Gaidai. Obviously, such a background did not in any way stimulate the cinematographic authorities, including orthodox Soviet critics, to openly express positive emotions about the film. Who knows, suddenly the general line will change once again ... And who knows, maybe Georgiy Daneliya, who intended to film "The Twelve Chairs", generously ceded the right to film adaptation to Gaidai for this very reason? Many publications mentioning this fact of history cite a vague "burned out" as the reason for the complacent gesture.

Today, in the twenty-first century, Gaidai's film is criticized as if from the opposite side. If in Soviet times the novel by Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, literally filled with allusions to real events and real characters of the 20s, was persecuted for an explicit satire on the Soviet order, the film based on this novel, although it was not persecuted, but did not enjoy the benevolent attitude of the authorities, today it is reproached for excessive, let's say, "Sovietness".

Yevgeny Margolit, chief art critic of the Gosfilmofond of the Russian Federation, wrote in an article dedicated to the memory of Gaidai in 2004: "Grigory Kozintsev, after watching "The Twelve Chairs", concluded in his diary:

"A cad who read the work of two intelligent writers. Boorish guffaw.".. But really, no matter how much you take offense at Kozintsev, and what is not in the Gaidai version of "The Twelve Chairs", is an intelligent ironically sad look at the whole Soviet mess. There is no Ostap Bender, obsessed with his dream of Rio de Janeiro (no wonder the performer of this role in his film, having acquired money, opened a restaurant in Moscow. And seems to be doing well). This is not Gaidai's hero. And not Gaidai's point of view. The great Gaidai was a Soviet director, and his hero was a Soviet man. Who doesn't need Rio de Janeiro at all."

And whether could there have been, more precisely, could have been made public in the early 70s, at the beginning of the so-called "stagnation", some other, let's say, interpretation of the novel by Ilf and Petrov?

In my opinion, taking into account the entire background of the creation of the film, the conditions in which it was created, we should agree with Yevgeny Nefedov, who wrote in his review:

"The Twelve Chairs" turned out to be almost the pinnacle in the career of a brilliant comedian and, of course, an outstanding phenomenon of cinema, albeit somewhat underestimated.... this is one of those rare, ageless comedies that can be reviewed several times a year, without getting tired of being amazed at the perfection and indescribable ingenuity of the gags, the accuracy of the socio-psychological characteristics of the characters, the accuracy of the reproduced atmosphere, the brightness of absolutely all situations: both main and secondary."

But the average modern moviegoer rated Leonid Gaidai's film "The Twelve Chairs" no less highly than half a century ago. 75% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users gave this film a rating of 8 to 10. At the same time, 28% of users rated the film at the highest level - "ten".

With this in mind, the rating of Leonid Gaidai's film "The Twelve Chairs" by FilmGourmand was 8.246, making it 452nd in the Golden Thousand.