Dangerous Moves

A well filmed movie of the tense contest for the World Championship between Soviet player Akiva Liebeskind (undoubtedly modeled after International Grandmaster Akiba Rubenstein, a magnificent master of the endgame, originally a rabbinical student in Poland who never quite made it to the World Championship level and declined into mental illness), and Liebeskind's challenger, Grandmaster Pavius Fromm (almost certainly named after "From" of the From's Gambit in chess). Fromm, a Lithuanian political exile from behind the Iron Curtain, is an arrogant dislikeable pawn of the Soviets who have kept his wife prisoner. Virtually unrecognizable are their wives, the once lovely Leslie Caron and Swedish star Liv Ullman who have little more than bit parts.

Personally, as a chessplayer who has been struggling to find the secret of chess for almost 30 years, it was made clear that Grandmasters of chess see farther than us ordinary mortals when Liebeskind analyzes his strategy to win the next game with the final coup by moving a Rook to the square G10! (The chessboard has only 8x8 squares.) Many incidents from the real history of chess are keyed into the script. When analyzing a game with his team, he objects to a player putting a cigarette to his mouth. "But it is not lit!" his friend replies. "Yes," says Liebeskind, "but it is well known that in chess the threat is greater than the execution". A quote right from Emmanuel Lasker, World Champion for 27 years. And this actualy occurred in a top level chess match when a player put an unlit cigar in his mouth, and his opponent protested.

When each player's team brings in a parapsychologist to stare down or even hypnotize his the opponent, there are vigorous protests. Exactly what happened in a match in Baguio City, the Phillipines when World Champion Anatoly Karpov's team brought parapsychologist Dr. Zharkov from Moscow to stare down the challenger, dissident and escapee from the Soviet Union, Viktor Korchnoi. (Korchnoi lost the match.)

In the end, I found the script of this move poorly written, disappointing in the ending, well acted and portraying the world of chess and a World Championship contest reasonably well. One jarring note was the large number and rows of empty seats in the auditorium where the World Championship was being played. In the real world, every seat would have been taken and overflow audiences would have been in auxiliary rooms watching on TV with commentary from other GM's unheard by the players. Did the producers just try to save a few pennies but not hiring enough extras to fill the seats? Hard to understand when clearly this was an expensive and lavish film portrayal of a World Chess Championship.

Almost a good movie. As a long time chessplayer, I am glad I watched it. I cannot recommend it as worthwhile for general audiences.

Two masters of chess duel each other not only in their game but also in their different ideologies. The veteran Akiva is a Soviet Jew and ferocious Communist, master of his game but also dealing with a declining health while the young and restless genius Pavius has defected to the West to escape from the Communist tentacles.

I love that this is billed as the "thinking man's Rocky". First, this assumes that "Rocky" is not for thinking men, which is not necessarily true. It may not be high art, but it's still a good movie. But that aside, I find it interesting to compare a film about a boxer with one about chess players.

Anyway, whether we accept that marketing or not, it really is a good film. I'm curious about how accurate the subtitles are (they notoriously changed "eight" to "ten" in an early scene) but even if the film was silent, it is quite visually appealing.

Disputing the world title of chess, sit down in chairs opposite two soviets. However, none of the two is Russian: one of them, the champion, is Jewish. The other, the challenger, is a Lithuanian, political exile that is refugee in another country. This game will be a mirror of the Cold War: each movement is dangerous, each play is strategically important. Who is the best? The communist Jew, obedient to the Soviet state, or the Lithuanian traitor, enemy of the proletarian revolution? A beautiful end, where the game in itself has, for both, a larger importance than the world title and they consequences. A good film, with reasonable tension, great representative of the rare Swiss movies.

Geneva welcomes the 23rd world chess championship, which sees the confrontation of the Soviet citizen Michel Piccoli, unconquered for 12 years, with his young fellow countryman, now a refugee in the West, Alexandre Arbatt, winner (conqueror) of the " tournament of the candidates "... The chess is only an excuse for a political tussle, the real game taking place gently in the wings in an East-West confrontation. The whole thing is perhaps a little dated.

"La Diagonale Du Fou" is notable as one of the only two Swiss films to ever take home the Academy Award for "Best Foreign Language Film". It is also notable as being one of only a handful of films about chess which, apparently, is not considered the most cinematic "sport", although with the right director it can be. Richard Dembo may not have been that director: his film is perfectly watchable, but not as exciting as it should / could have been. Unsurprisingly, the brightest moments involve the actual chess games; most of the other stuff (the wise old pro and the rebellious young upstart, the neglected wives, the Cold War tensions, etc.) we have seen before, in different surroundings. The little-known Alexandre Arbatt holds his own against the well-known Michel Piccoli; Leslie Caron receives third billing but is largely wasted; Liv Ullmann fares a little better. **1/2 out of 4.