come on my peoples!
What's you favorite chess movie?
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Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
Here is a list:
http://chess.eusa.ed.ac.uk/Chess/Trivia/chmovies.html
I have a great fondness for Sherlock Holmes, so I suppose Sherlock Holmes Faces Death would have to be mine, though the chess part is minor.
On the smaller screen...
There is a great Mission Impossible episode (3rd season, I think) which involves an unbeatable chess computer and using it to cheat in a tournament.
I seem to recall a Law & Order episode that featured a very thinly-veiled portrayal of Fischer as a mad chess genius.
Casablanca is my favorite movie with a minor chess scene. This is from Wikipedia:
Chess
Bogart was an excellent chess player, almost of master strength. Before he made any money from acting, he would hustle players for dimes and quarters, playing in New York parks and at Coney Island. The chess scenes in Casablanca had not been in the original script, but were put in at his insistence. A chess position from one of his correspondence games appears in the movie, although the image is a little blurred. He achieved a draw in a simultaneous exhibition given in 1955 at Beverly Hills by the famous chess Grandmaster Samuel Reshevsky and also played against George Koltanowski in San Francisco in 1952 (Koltanowski played blindfolded but still won in 41 moves).[119]
Bogart was a United States Chess Federation tournament director and active in the California State Chess Association, and a frequent visitor to the Hollywood chess club. In 1945, the cover of the June-July issue of Chess Review showed Bogart playing with Charles Boyer, as Lauren Bacall (who also played) looks on. In June 1945, in an interview in the magazine Silver Screen, when asked what things in life mattered most to him, he replied that chess was one of his main interests. He added that he played chess almost daily, especially between film shootings. He loved the game all his life.[120]
I suppose a movie about Spassky would be interesting. What kind of pressure was he under to beat Bobby Fischer? How many of Fischer's accusations were true? Was the KGB trying to psych Fischer out? What really happened to Spassky when he lost?
And, of course, Frank Poole losing to HAL in 2001, a Space Odyssey
Sarah Connor chronicles (TV series,Terminator) Sarah and John Connor trying to get the Turk a chess computer program.
verdantlife wrote:
Here is a list:
http://chess.eusa.ed.ac.uk/Chess/Trivia/chmovies.html
I have a great fondness for Sherlock Holmes, so I suppose Sherlock Holmes Faces Death would have to be mine, though the chess part is minor.
On the smaller screen...
There is a great Mission Impossible episode (3rd season, I think) which involves an unbeatable chess computer and using it to cheat in a tournament.
I seem to recall a Law & Order episode that featured a very thinly-veiled portrayal of Fischer as a mad chess genius.
Yes I remember that Mission Impossible from like when I was 15 years old. I'm sure it was a rerun...
nimzovich wrote:
polydiatonic wrote:
P.S. I met Sammy Reshevsky when I was about 18 or 19 in Long Island when I was an intern at channel 13 broadcast on Shelby Lyman's Karpov/Korchoni championship coverage.
What was your impression of Reshevsky?
He was all business. He seemed to be in a bit of sour mood that day. He was a small man, probably about 70 at the time, was wearing an overcoat and a hat the whole time. I got the impression that he didn't really know who Shelby Lyman was or perhaps it was more that he didn't understand why Lyman rated having the show rather than a stronger player/analyst. Just my impression.
tonydal wrote:
Then there was that Columbo about the chess genius.
Is that the one where one world class player killed the other one to elliminate the competition?
Personally, I'd like to see a movie about Mikhail Tal.
Many years ago there was a pretty good weekly spy series on American tv called "Mission Impossible." In one of the episodes, the group intelligence leader had to pose as a chess master and play an important game against a "real" master. He was taught the basic moves, and was fitted with eyeglasses containing a minicamera and microphone. At that time, this was very state of the art electronics, and was unquestionably the first broadcasted incident of electronic cheating in a chess game!
Knights Of The South Bronx. I believe the movie was based at PS 70 the school where I played in my first chess tournament back in 1969 !!
Ernie
rubygabbi wrote:
Many years ago there was a pretty good weekly spy series on American tv called "Mission Impossible." In one of the episodes, the group intelligence leader had to pose as a chess master and play an important game against a "real" master. He was taught the basic moves, and was fitted with eyeglasses containing a minicamera and microphone. At that time, this was very state of the art electronics, and was unquestionably the first broadcasted incident of electronic cheating in a chess game!
Yes, this is the one I mentioned. I looked it up. It's in Season 2, titled "A Game of Chess", first aired 1/14/1968. The IMF agent is playing against a chess grandmaster (who is also a spy for the bad guys) and cheats by way of a chess computer (the size of a refrigerator) and an ear piece.
Amusingly, the chess computer is "unbeatable" and it is shown repeatedly whipping the poor grandmaster. That was 1968 - about 30 years before it happened in real life.
Another show: the original Star Trek! We often see Spock and Kirk playing in the first season. I remember it clearly in "To Go Where No Man Can Go Before" (Kirk checkmates Spock and he is irritated), "Charlie X" (the teen mutant becomes very frustrated), and "Court Martial" (where Spock discusses programming the computer).
True, it's "tri-dimensional chess" but it's still chess.
BTW, how cool is Kirk - he could beat a Vulcan at chess ;-)
I love Searching for Bobby Fischer, even though it is about Josh Waitzkin
I would have mentioned Star Trek but didn't want to appear too geeky. I think it's in the episode "Conscious of the King" where Kirk and Spock use a move in descriptive notation as a recognition code. Does anyone remember that? If it was the future wouldn't they use algebraic notation?
...I was wrong. The episode was "Whom Gods Destroy". It was a code between Scotty and Kirk. Scotty says "Queen to queen's level three". That's as far as I watched. BTW, CBS has classic Star Trek episodes for free.
And, what chess player(s) do you think should have a movie about his/her life?
With all of this talk about the Fischer movie now in production it got me thinking about this....it seems that in the Fischer movie that's being made now the story will end at about 1973. For me that's a dissappointment because it's the story and his psychological downward spiral after his career (mainly) ended that is the biggest mystery to me. Most of us know what happened in his life up to that poin, right?
So, to answer my own question, I think a film about Paul Morphy and his life would be fascinating. Given what I know that might be a very, very compelling and dramatic story to be told.
Maybe even more so a film about the life of Wunderkind and championship contentender Samuel Reshevsky. I mean this kid is beating championship contentenders at like the age of 10 or something?
What do you think?
P.S. I met Sammy Reshevsky when I was about 18 or 19 in Long Island when I was an intern at channel 13 broadcast on Shelby Lyman's Karpov/Korchoni championship coverage. The green room was very cool place to be for those few weeks when I was doing that. Also spent some time talking to Bent Larsen and his wife on the phone while he was waiting to be interviewd...I'm thinking that that was in about 1981 or so...but I digress...