Chess Movies
Chess in the movies: the book
I had discovered Bob Basalla’s Chess in the Movies last week while reposting seven* of my own 2002 examples thereof. I’ve got the published-in-2005 book now and I’m prepared to do a little review:
“Welcome to my obsession,” Bob starts. The first thing I did with this book was check each of my seven movie-entries: Four of them had no entries, leading me to conjecture that the “more than 2000 movies” listed in this encyclopedic effort might well represent only a third or so of the movies out there (as of 2005). The entry for the 1903 A Chess Dispute was fine. Chaplin’s The Great Dictator entry sported a position diagram that had a white bishop (diagonally adjacent to the white queen) that I believe is actually a knight. And, finally, Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case entry was so topsy-turvy that it’s difficult to imagine what went wrong here...
In The Paradine Case, Bob has the roles of characters Judy Flaquer and her father, Simon, totally reversed: Judy “makes two black moves in a row” (Simon played black). She says things that Simon actually said in the movie, and — for good measure — Simon is quoted as saying something that Judy actually said. To top it off, Bob has Judy being played by actress Isobel Elsom, not Joan Tetzel.
Looking over seven additional movies that I had studied to some extent (one of these was missing), Bob’s entries were as good or better than what I might have come up with: The entry for Ravenous presented detail that I had not myself perceived and I will have to revisit that movie one day in order to ascertain what’s truly what. The entry for Geri’s Game failed to mention a position discontinuity (at the turning point) in the game.
I like the fact that Bob has devised symbols for errors that occur frequently and also his “Chess Encounters of the First (Second, Third) Kind” classification scheme (although I really think CE1 is every bit as good as C.E.1 — lose the periods). For the most part, my observations mimic in scope those of Edward Winter in his 2005 review of the book. And like him, I hope a future second edition will improve on the failings of the first.
Friday, October 3, 2008
