16 May 2019

Chess Obsessed

After Moscow Panoramas, what else can I do that avoids 'requiring any significant amount of work'? How about something along the lines of 'The Game of Life' or 'The Chess-Players' (January 2019), which was based on that month's 'Top eBay Chess Items by Price'? For the current month that would be a post following on Hyde's Mandragorias (May 2019).

I found a half-dozen recent eBay photos from roughly the same period as the item in the 'Hyde' post, couldn't decide which I liked best, and chose the one that I knew most about. Another photo from the same film is on my page Chess in the Movies (p.2), where the description says, 'Brainwashed (Schachnovelle, 1961); Allied Artists Pictures; Curt Jurgens'.


Curd Jurgens - Brainwashed

Is the actor's name Curt or Curd? The film also figured in a post on this blog, Chess Behanced (February 2014), where I made the connection between Stefan Zweig's novella 'The Royal Game' (aka Schachnovelle) and 'Brainwashed'. That post pointed to a couple of Wikipedia references and used the name Curd Jürgens. The Wikipedia page, Curd Jürgens, starts,

Curd Gustav Andreas Gottlieb Franz Jürgens (13 December 1915 – 18 June 1982) was a German-Austrian stage and film actor. He was usually billed in English-speaking films as Curt Jurgens.

It looks like it's 'Curd' in German and 'Curt' in English. As I do with most differences in spelling, I'll continue to use whatever my source uses along with a mention (usually 'aka') of the alternative.

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. One last word about the original eBay photo: it sold for $19.59 'Buy It Now'.

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