The first full-length chess movie (140 minutes) was the 1927 French work Le Joueur d’Échecs (The Chess Player). It is set in 1776 and depicts a Polish uprising against Russia. The chess player in the title was the famous automaton the Turk, which – both in the film and in real life – was constructed by Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen. In the film, a Polish insurgent escapes inside the Turk.
The battles between the Polish and Russian cavalry provide spectacular scenes. The French director, with a large budget, went to Poland and was given 2,000 Polish cavalrymen to work with.
The evening before filming was spent by the crew and the soldiers in a convivial atmosphere, with plenty of vodka. The next morning, the Poles enthusiastically charged the cameras on their horses. It resulted in two injured cameramen, an injured assistant director, an injured photographer, and several destroyed cameras, but also in fantastic footage.
I got these compelling details from the Dutch book Filmgids voor Schaakliefhebbers (Film Guide for Chess Lovers) by Rob Spaans, published this year. He describes 160 chess movies released between 1903 and 2023.
I was surprised to find that the 1960 German film Schachnovelle starring Curd Jürgens, featured the extremely popular Dutch actor Rijk de Gooijer in a supporting role as the secretary of an SS officer.
He supposedly was paid 600 guilders a day for it and had ten days of filming, which together comes to 24,000 modern euros. Spaans finds this quite a lot of money for a small role, but I don’t rule out that Rijk has exaggerated a bit about that fee to his Amsterdam friends, as such was his habit.
The Dutch writer-actor-singer-theater critic and jack of all trades Ischa Meijer had a supporting role in Esmé Lammers’ film De Schaker en de Dame (The Chessplayer and the Queen) from 1989. Spaans calls this graduation film Lammers’s dress rehearsal for her fine film from 1995 Lang Leve de Koningin (Long Live the Queen.)
In the earlier film, Ischa is the second of a Dutchman playing for the world championship.
Let me quote a few intriguing lines from the book:
“It might not have been a natural death, because there’s a large arrow sticking out of his chest.” (About The Bishop Murder Case, 1929)
“After that queen exchange, my multiple-pawn gained an additional value because castling blocked your rook. Which, in a Sicilian Defence, can do little against my Grünfeld-Indian middlegame.” (This probably intentional gibberish was from an episode of a popular Dutch television series Toen was Geluk heel Gewoon (Then Happines Was Just Common), 1997)
“Parts of a chess game notation were found in the mouths of both victims, so it is obvious to conclude that the motive for the murders is related to chess.” (About The Sicilian Defence, 2013, from the endless British series Midsomer Murders).
There is also a website with links to sites where all the films from the book can be viewed, usually for free:
https://sites.google.com/view/robspaans-filmgids
You can spend a long and enjoyable time with the book and those links and I was therefore surprised to see that the first edition had a print run of only 256 copies. Perhaps because it is still a work in progress.
Many films use games that were actually played. The game in the viwer is from a tournament in Maastricht that was won by Max Euwe in 1946. Later the game was featured in The Most Dangerous Match (1973), an episode of the popular American series Columbo, with Peter Falk as the sleuth.
Strange, a victory by the far from famous Dutch player Wolthuis finding its way to an American Columbo episode. But more was to come. After I had written about Spaans’ book in the Dutch weekly De Groene Amsterdammer, I was told by a friend that another game by Wolthuis, played in the same insignificant tournament (Wolthuis-Euwe, Maastricht 1946) was extensively used in a recent Dutch film Nesjomme, a documentary about Jewish life in the Netherlands before 1940. The same Wolthuis and the same tournament. Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice said.
Willem Jan Wolthuis (1919-2006) would become a pillar of the club VAS (United Amsterdam Chess Society). In the banking world, according to another chess-playing banker, he became part of the “almost cream butter class” of the banking hierarchy, allowing him to play a key role in establishing and maintaining Amsterdam tournaments such as the annual IBM tournament.
He enjoyed a good joke and is credited with saying, after accepting a financial position in his chess club: “I’m really not going to complain about dimes and quarters. At the bank, I was used to rounding up to half a million.”
Hugh Alexander (1909-1974) beat Botvinnik and Bronstein, but was hampered in his chess career by his demanding profession as a cryptographer. During World War II, he held a high-ranking position in the project Enigma, that was successfully set up to break German codes, and later he would be prevented from traveling to the Eastern Bloc because authorities from British Intelligence feared he would be kidnapped by the Communists for his secret knowledge.
Click here to view Wolthuis-Alexander, Maastricht 1946