25 June 2019

'Chess in the Movies' Checkpoint

It's time to take a checkpoint on a subject introduced in Chess Obsessed (May 2019). I wrote,

Back to that 'Chess in the Movies' page, I created it sometime around 2005. It might be worthwhile to survey images I've collected since then and, if I have enough examples, add another sub-page on the same topic.

The referenced page is Chess in the Movies, and so far, without any real effort, I found 152 photos to work through. The following composite shows the first eight (ordered according to my internal file naming convention, which is random).

Top row: (info from the text accompanying the photo)

  • 1940 The Sea Hawk ['Chess in the Movies' different scene]
  • 1958 Fraulein.
  • 1963 Il fornaretto di Venezia (aka The Scapegoat)
  • 1962. Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color; Episode: The Prince and the Pauper - The Merciful Law of the King

Bottom row:

  • 1970 Flap [behind the scenes shot]
  • 1972 Rat' mal, wer heut bei uns schlaft... (aka The Swinging Pussycats)
  • 1957 The One That Got Away
  • 1970 The Passion of Anna (aka En Passion)

Out of the eight photos, six are usable. The first one on the top row, '1940 The Sea Hawk', is a repeat, and the first one on the bottom row, '1970 Flap', is a behind the scenes shot. If the percentages hold up -- which I have no way of knowing -- I have around 110 usable photos. Since a new 'Chess in the Movies' sub-page requires 24 photos, I have enough material for four new pages. That is on top of the three pages I already have.

Another aspect to consider is how I name foreign language films. I currently have both

  • La Vérité (The Truth, 1960) and
  • Brainwashed (Schachnovelle, 1961)

In the samples above, I have at least three foreign films: French, German, and Italian. Which should be the main title, the English version or the original version?

1 comment:

Hazer said...

The Thomas Crown Affair 1968 has a famous chess scene, I think the remake also does.