― Benjamin Franklin
These are only a few of many movies which feature a chess game in some way, but the earliest of all chess films is a silent short from 1903 called A Chess Dispute, which is about a game gone bad:
“Chess teaches foresight, by having to plan ahead; vigilance, by having to keep watch over the whole chess board; caution, by having to restrain ourselves from making hasty moves; and finally, we learn from chess the greatest maxim in life - that even when everything seems to be going badly for us we should not lose heart, but always hoping for a change for the better, steadfastly continue searching for the solutions to our problems.” ― Benjamin Franklin I enjoy an occasional game of chess, although I'm not a good player. I've always meant to find the time to study the game and better my skills, but haven't done so yet; maybe I like the idea of being good at chess more than I like the thought of working towards that goal. One of my nephews has taken up the game, and I have the lowering suspicion that it won't be too long before he is able to beat me at it. I am looking forward to watching my favourite chess movie with him, though: Searching For Bobby Fischer. I think that he'll enjoy it. Searching For Bobby Fischer is a great film, but there are lots of movies which feature chess games. One is the delightful 1997 Pixar short pictured on the right: Geri's Game. Pixar has produced a lot of really cute film shorts over the years, but I think that this is my favourite one. There are plenty of other films which include a chess scene in them; here's a few of them: This is a scene from the 1957 movie The Seventh Seal, which is set in medieval Sweden during an outbreak of the Black Plague. In it, knight Antonius Block returns from the Crusades only to meet a black robed figure who turns out to be Death, come to claim his life. Hoping to delay this fate, Block challenges Death to a game of chess. In the 1942 film Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart's character Rick Blaine is sitting in his nightclub playing chess against himself when he is approached by seedy criminal Signor Ugarte- played by the always great Peter Lorre- about the letters of transit. Incidentally, Bogart was an excellent chess player who, before he became a star, used to earn money playing chess in New York parks. Stalag 17 is a 1953 film about American POWs held in a German prison camp during World War II. The men gradually become convinced that someone in their midst is a German spy. Chess ends up playing an important role in the movie. In the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, astronaut Frank Poole plays a game of chess with the computer HAL 9000. I've only made it all the way through this film once- a long time ago- and never realized this, but one clue given that something's seriously off with HAL is that he cheats during the game. Incidentally this is how, in the TOS episode Court Martial, Spock figures out that there's something wrong with the ship's computer system. The computer logs seem to implicate Kirk in a crime which he denies perpetrating. Spock is playing 3-D chess against the computer and wins a series of games. Since he programmed the game into the system, Spock reasons that he should only be able to play to a draw which leads him to suspect that someone has tampered with the computer, causing other glitches. These are only a few of many movies which feature a chess game in some way, but the earliest of all chess films is a silent short from 1903 called A Chess Dispute, which is about a game gone bad:
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