Chess movies; Gaston Needleman

By Frank “Boy” Pestaño
Chessmoso

I was watching the movie Phenomenon 1996) starring John Travolta and Robert Duvall the other week on HBO, where there were several chess scenes.

It gave me an idea to do a series of articles on movies which feature chess prominently or as a background story.

In Phenomenon, the small-town mechanic George Malley (Travolta) is transformed by a strange flash of light from the sky into a super-intelligent being who absorbs information like a sponge, learns Portuguese in 30 minutes, uses telekinesis and plays chess like a grandmaster.

His friends, especially the town doctor (Duvall), his love interest Lace Pennamin (Kyra Sedgwick) and his best friend and chess playmate Nate Pope (Forest Whitaker) are at first intrigued and amused. However, they gradually become afraid of him and the government wants also to know what happened to this ordinary man.

Carl Schenkel’s murder mystery Knight Moves (1992) stars Christopher Lambert as Peter Sanderson, a chess champion. He becomes a suspect when a woman he recently slept with was brutally murdered, including several other women.

But when the murderer contacts Sanderson and informs him that this was a maniacal human chess game, he realizes that he has to beat the murderer to stop the killings and clear his name. Diane Lane plays a psychologist who falls for Sanderson and Tom Skerritt is the detective investigating the case.

Searching for Bobby Fischer (Paramount 1993) is the true story of child chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin (Max Pomeranc) as written by his father Fred Waitzkin.

His teacher is the famous author Bruce Pandolfini (Ben Kingsley), who teaches chess the Bobby Fischer way – total commitment and dedication, and other negative Fischer traits such as contempt of opponents.

Josh is in danger of sacrificing his decency, but in the end he is able to successfully blend ruthless competition with good sportsmanship.

The movie is a showcase of scholastic chess in America and the “chess mothers and fathers” syndrome.

He is an eight-time national champion and an international master, not a world-class player that was expected of him but highly respected as a martial arts expert (taichi chuan push-hands middleweight champion) and has a rich intellectual life.

Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) has won a multitude of awards including the Cannes Film Festival prize. It stars Max Von Sydow as a 14th-century knight wearily heading home after a decade of combat.

Disillusioned by misery and plague, he concludes that God does not exist.

As he travels through the wilderness, he is visited by Death (Bengt Ekrot), garbed in the traditional black robe. Von Sydow does not want to die as yet so he challenges the Grim Reaper to a game of chess – if he wins he lives if not he dies.

As they play, the knight and the Grim Reaper get into a discussion whether God exists. The movie ends with one of the most indelible of all of Bergman’s films: the dance of death.

Another movie with a chess plot is the Luzhin Defense (2000), starring John Turturro and Emily Watson. Turturro plays Alexander Ivanovich Luzhin, a Russian chess master so absent-minded that he doesn’t know what city he’s in most of the time.

Emily Watson is attracted to the socially inept genius at a resort in Northern Italy, where he is playing a chess match. The movie features chess exhibitions, a blindfold exhibition and giant chess sets. In the end, Luzhin commits suicide by jumping out of the window. He can never be happy with Watson unless he gives up the game, which is eating him alive.

Grandmaster Jonathan Speelman was the technical advisor of this film.

GASTON NEEDLEMAN. The controversial American Continental Championship held in Buenos Aires was won last week by Cuban GM Lazaro Bruzon with seven others tied for second place. Since Fide has promised that only seven will get free tickets to the World Cup, a playoff was necessary to determine the qualifiers. The seven would have to play a tiebreak to decide the six qualifiers and one player would have to be left out.

Why is this so controversial lately? To start with, the qualifiers all have 2600-plus ratings with the exception of one person, actually still a 15-year-old boy, and rated only 2242! His name is Gaston Needleman of Argentina.

In the tiebreak, the other qualifiers allegedly ganged up against the boy to force him out which actually happened. So is this the end of the story? Not quite.

Media made a major fuss over it such that Fide president Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, upon the request of Gov. Alberto Rodriguez Saa of San Luis, Argentina, site of the 2005 World Championship, decided to give the boy a free ticket to the 2006 World Cup – a happy ending.

Watch out for this kid. He had a 2655 performance rating in this tournament.