Hope for the best! Expect the worst!(The rich are blessed. The poor are cursed.)

"Hope for the best! Expect the worst!
Some drink champagne. Some die of thirst.
No way of knowing
which way it's going.
Hope for the best! Expect the worst!"

-- the opening stanza of the theme song from Mel Brooks's

The Twelve Chairs, written by -- who else? -- Mel Brooks

by Ken

Observant DWT readers may have noticed, perhaps even been relieved, that I have more or less disappeared since the giddy days of the presidential inauguration. It's not that I had wild hopes or expectations, but even in my gloomiest forebodings I wasn't expecting, well, this.

"Life is sorrow!
Here today and gone tomorrow!"

And for, well, this, there's no better chronicler than Howie, so I've been content to leave to him the messy job of reporting the astonishing shenanigans of the remnants of Rush Limbaugh's Republican Party, which has adopted the official position: "Ah, screw the country -- if it'll do us some good," and of the Obama administration, apparently setting its sights on being a somewhat more principled version of . . . the Bush regime!

Well, it's time to step up to the plate. It just took me awhile to recognize where my head really is these days. I should have had an inkling the other day when I realized that what was going through my head was Dom DeLuise hymn-singing, "Our tears shall banish sorrow." (That is the line, isn't it?) As, of course, the greedy, grasping defrocked priest Father Fyodor in Mel Brooks's zany and stirring masterpiece, The Twelve Chairs.

"I knew a man who saved a fortune that was splendid.
Then he died the day he planned to go and spend it!"

I give Mel credit for salvaging the reputation and honor of his first film, the longtime cult treasure The Producers, even if he had to do it in the form of a harmless entertainment that seems to me more or less the sort of thing he was making fun of when he first had the idea of a Broadway musical called Springtime for Hitler. But what about his second film, the if-anything-greater tragicomic treasure hunt, The Twelve Chairs? (Imagine if you will a production built around a principal cast of Ron Moody, Frank Langella -- the incredibly gorgeous, way-pre-Nixon young Frank Langella -- and Dom DeLuise, three actors so different it's hard to even imagine them inhabiting the same movie.)

For decades these two glorious pictures, which failed so badly at the box office that they nearly earned Mel the privilege of never making another movie, survived as a double bill in the cinematic revival houses, back when there were cinematic revival houses. And then we had them, the whole movies themselves, on VHS, to watch whenever we wanted!

"So take your chances!
There are no answers!"

I once actually sat with the VHS -- or by then it was the Laserdisk? -- of The Twelve Chairs, going over the opening theme song, over and over, transcribing the master's brilliant lyrics. This morning, when I realized what I wanted to write about, it occurred to me that probably all you have to do is go to YouTube. This, thanks to a brand-new computer, courtesy of Howie (on my old computer I was clip-challenged to the point of near impossibility), I was able to do in a flash, and sure enough, there it was: "Hope for the best! Expect the worst!"

We've got plenty of time to rattle around among the X's and O's of our current grim political playbook. Meanwhile, as the song shouts:

"Live while you're alive!
No one will survive!
There's no guarantee."

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