Vsevolod Pudovkin-Shakhmatnaya goryachka ('Chess Fever') (1925)

With an international chess tournament in progress, a young man becomes completely obsessed with the game. His fiancée has no interest in it, and becomes frustrated and depressed by his neglect of her, but wherever she goes she finds that she cannot escape chess. On the brink of giving up, she meets the world champion, Capablanca himself, with interesting results. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0015673/plotsummary)




The setup is simple: a young man and his fiancé. He is besotted by chess and cannot think of anything else, even setting up a board in mid-proposal. But he is not alone; every male in the world is similarly captured. We have a cop who stops in midarrest to play with his captive. It goes on a bit too long, but the humor is unexpected in a part of the world between two huge wars and two equally destructive rules. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0015673/usercomments)




The film opens with some dispiritingly authentic chess tournaments - yep, just grandmasters sitting at tables, playing chess, and people watching. Then the comedy begins. Its conflict is that a chess nut's fiancee loathes the game, and cannot escape from it wherever she turns. Her only chance of happiness is to conform to society's pleasure. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0015673/usercomments)




This is very funny and quite creative, and it's particularly enjoyable if you like to play chess. You'd never expect something this genuinely amusing from a Soviet-era film. The movie makes very good use of a simple plot idea, with a young man's "Chess Fever" causing problems for him and his fiancée, setting up a pretty good variety of gags that work quite well. If you are a chess fan, it is also fun to see the great Capablanca making a film appearance, plus shorter appearances by several other well-known players of the era (i.e. : Ernst Grunfeld, Frank Marshall, Richard Reti, Rudolph Spielmann, Carlos Torre, F.D. Yates...) . It's all good entertainment, and a movie well worth seeing. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0015673/usercomments)






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