Why do the movies love chess?
By Finlo Rohrer
BBC News Magazine
The late Ingmar Bergman’s film the Seventh Seal helped cement his reputation as a cerebral director, and might explain why chess is such an enduring theme for film makers.
In the Seventh Seal a Swedish knight returns from the crusades to find his home country ravaged by tragedy and is soon locked in a game of chess with death.
Without giving much away, it’s a fairly intense game.
Bergman’s arthouse favourite is perhaps the most notorious example of chess on celluloid, but there are hundreds and hundreds of others. From the brainiest to the schlockiest, one of the movie world’s favourite devices is chess.
And among the chess-playing fraternity there’s a whole subculture of “chess in the movies” discussion, with a number of dedicated websites, and Bob Basalla’s book Chess in the Movies, providing exhaustive lists stretching up to 2,000 titles.
Perhaps the second best known chess scene is in the Thomas Crown Affair, where Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway enjoy a romantically-charged game.
Satyajit Ray’s the Chess Players is another arthouse classic, while 2000’s Luzhin Defence had a grandmaster as its central character.
But for many chess aficionados, the best example of the game has to be in the second James Bond film, From Russia With Love, where the Spectre agent Kronsteen ruthlessly beats the Canadian master McAdams.
Plotting moves
This fictional struggle was based on a real and much-discussed game between Boris Spassky and David Bronstein – who inspired the name Kronsteen despite being the loser in the real-life game – in Leningrad in 1960.
Grandmaster, writer and chess entrepreneur Raymond Keene says it is easily his favourite chess scene.
“It leaves off two of the pawns on the queen-side but the way they stage it in the movie is really magnificent, the giant chessboards and the ‘Venice’ set. When I try and arrange a chess tournament I’m aiming for that. The position itself is very well chosen.”
CHESS MOVIES
The Chess Players
Blade Runner
Seventh Seal
From Russia With Love
Casablanca
Chess Fever
Thomas Crown Affair
And the chess scene perfectly sets up the character of the evil Kronsteen. He is a chess master so he is someone who plots every move in great detail and thinks a long way ahead.
“Kronsteen works for Spectre. He’s an evil genius of vast cunning but he is defeated by Bond’s British bravura, attacking each problem as it comes.
“I feel flattered that we chess grandmasters are regarded as geniuses,” Keene adds
And the use in From Russia With Love certainly gives us a clue as to the nature of Hollywood’s relationship with chess.
Here is the full story.
I love chess in the movies. I wish there’re more.
how is thomas crowns affair a chess movie?
Problem with chess in the movies is there isn’t much chess there, usually. You might see a chess set (big deal), sometimes they might use a real position, and sometimes they might even put a white square in the right corner, but it’s usually no more than just a prop in a scene.
Try to think of a movie where chess plays a meaningful part in the story, rather than just being used as a literary device to establish that the main character is smart.
i wish my lifelong dream to c chess on television some day via satelite or espn whtever if possible
Anonymous.
They mean the original Thomas Crown Affair with Steve McQueen.
My favourite chess moment is, I believe, in “McLintock” when John Wayne says something like “King’s Bishop to King Three”…
Banjanx
Could it be that all the chess movies mentioned are of more significance than that of a certain one based by a Nabakov novel, because I can’t see what I’m looking for…
Google: chess in the cinema.for ALL the chess movies!
How many of these could really be considered chess movies? Casablanca has a brief blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of Bogie playing chess to establish in the audience’s mind that Rick is clever.
From Russia With Love is a little better. An actual position from a GM game (well, almost). But really chess has nothing to do with the plot.
One forgotten movie is David Niven’s Stairway to Heaven. Chess plays a fairly decent part there. At one point the angel even tries to get Niven to come along like a good boy by promising him that he’ll get to meet Philidor (though Niven has never heard of him. Hmmm.)
The Sheriff plays chess briefly in Blazing Saddles, doesn’t he?
Chess in Star Trek could be a subject unto itself.
Trek, with its bizarre take on logic vs. emotion posited the idea that Kirk’s intuitive style beats Spock’s logical one. In the two games we see them play with each other (Where No Man Has Gone Before, Charlie X) Spock loses them both, and attributes his defeat to Kirk’s illogical playing style. Really, what happens in both games is that Spock overlooks a mate in 1 and then calls Kirk illogical for finding it. Hmmm… Smarty-pants Vulcans. But then those 3-D boards are pretty hard to read.
The only human opponent we ever see beat is Charlie in Charlie X. Charlie, like Capablanca, learns without being told the moves, by watching others. Except he doesn’t learn very well because Spock flattens him in 2 moves. Charlie vents his rage on the equipment by melting all Spock’s pieces with his psionic hex vision. And you thought Nimzovich was a bad loser.
In Court-Martial, we get the odd idea that chess is some kind of dry mathematical exercise. Spock has programmed the Enterprise computers for chess (why he didn’t just go out and buy a copy of Fritz 3000, I’ll never know). But the idea is that since he “gave it all his knowledge” (which, judging by previous episodes wasn’t all that much), he should never be able to beat it. When he creams it 5 straight, he knows that someone’s been tampering with the computer. Somehow using Windows Movie Maker to tamper with the log playback videos had affected the chess program. (Don’t ask). An extra cute bit: the episode writer didn’t realize that a draw and a stalemate are not quite the same thing, and so had Spock (who never used a 1 syllable word when 2 would do), claiming that unless he blunders, the best he should be able to do against the computer is “stalemate after stalemate”.
In The Corbomite Maneuver, we never actually see a chess set, but the episode’s struggle is compared to a chess game. Trapped by a superior alien force, Spock opines that it’s like chess. When you’re outmatched, you’re beat. Game over, dude. Discarding this less-than-helpful suggestion, Kirk decides that the struggle is really more like a poker game and bluffs his way out of the situation. A much better story than I’m making it sound, in fact one of the best episodes the show ever made.
In Whom Gods Destroy (a very late episode made in the last season when the show was getting silly), we’re treated to Star Trek chess notation! (Actually it’s Descriptive Notation with the word “Level” added to every move).
Beaming down to an insane asylum planet, Kirk leaves two chess moves as a sign and countersign to identify himself to Scotty, just in case an insane shape-changing inmate should take Kirk’s place and try to escape to the ship. Amazingly, this is exactly what happens.
How does it work? At beamup time, Scotty says “Queen to Queen’s Level Three”, and Kirk has to give the countersign, which is “Queen to King’s Level One”, rather than, as you might expect, something like “You know Scotty, most people these days are using algebraic”.
Keene finds it hard to get anything right once again.
Kronsteen does not work for SPECTRE, but for SMERSH.
Are you sure? I thought that in the book Kronsteen worked for Smersh and in the film he worked for Spectre. He gets killed by Blofeld in the film. (Though he might work for both).
susan werent there supposed to b ratification on newly elected members