I find the fact to be quite telling that the latest series is from a book by Walter Tevis, the man who wrote "The Hustler," "The Color of Money" and "The Man Who Fell to Earth," all three of which were made into movies. Mr. Tevis's life reads like what you'd expect a successful writer's life to be: a teacher, drunk, inveterate gambler, pool player and chess player, traveling on the pock-marked dirt road of life. Mr. Tevis passed away at 56 in 1984 due to lung cancer.
The 1983 NYT book review of Mr. Tevis's book 'The Queen's Gambit' earned high praise. Interesting, that when you dive into the review it's on a page with the long-gone Robert Byrne chess column, as is Dylan Loeb McClain's from the chess beat. I don't think I see anything about chess games any longer in the NYT. Another subtraction.
'The Queen's Gambit' is a fictional and biographical story about a young woman from Lexington, Kentucky who becomes the world chess champion. Beth Harmon is orphaned at about eight years old when her clearly mentally troubled mother commits suicide by car, driving head-on into a truck. Beth survives without a scratch, but had no other relatives to raise her. It would seem Beth is the a result of an affair her mother had with a married man with family. Beth becomes a ward of the state and an orphanage looms in her life.
Through flashbacks, it seems Beth's mother was a gifted mathematician, a near Ph.D. Young Beth is painfully smarter than anyone else at the orphanage, and therefore doesn't quite fit in. The subjects are boring and certainly not mentally challenging.
She is sent to the cellar the "clap the erasers." If anyone went to grammar school in the era of the 1950s you would know of slate blackboards, white chalk and chalk dust build up on the erasers. The build up was addressed by taking an eraser in each hand and "clapping" the felt surfaces against each other to shake the dust out. Teachers usually always chose someone special to go out in the hall to "clap the erasers."
In Beth's case, it's in the cellar where she encounters the janitor who is playing chess by himself. How you play chess with yourself is not something I understand, but I can see how you might not have a ready opponent. A solitaire game of chess.
The rest of the story is a straight-forward sports story of triumph over the demons of internal adversity, but exquisitely told with pitch-perfect detail of the 1960s. The casting, music, and accurate recreation of games and atmosphere makes watching chess being played exciting, even for someone who may not know what goes into a Queen's gambit opening.
Apparently an incredible amount of chess consultancy went into the making of series, a series that was snake-bitten ever since 2008 when Heath Ledger, who was supposed to be direct the property acquired in the early 1990s by the screenwriter Allan Scott died of a prescription drug overdose. The project hit the pause button.
Gary Kasparov, a former world chess champion and now Russian activist who criticizes Putin and has so far not been fed anything radioactive, took enough time off from his political agenda to do the technical consulting for the series. Just like how 'The Hustler' movie used Willie Mosconi, 15-time World Straight Pool Champion as a technical adviser, the producers have tapped into Mr. Kasparov's head, who will tell anyone who asks, 'The Queen's Gambit' "is as close to possible to the authentic atmosphere of chess tournaments."
The Netflix production stars Anya Taylor-Joy, an Argentinian/British actress who at 24 has nothing but brightness ahead of her. Her expressive brown eyes, surrounded by egg-white sclera, move about like search lights. If they were butterflies, you'd be chasing her with a net.
The clothes, hairstyle, and makeup all scream '60s. In one scene, a Russian chauffeur blurts out that having Beth in the back seat is like driving Ann-Margaret around. He's got a point. It's almost an inside joke, since Anya Taylor-Joy is a dancer as well as actress.
Mr. Tevis is seems was an avid pool player and decent club-level chess player, living the itinerant life of pool and chess hustler. With references to the greats of chess and the outcomes of their games, you get a sense of the players who look at chess games as if they were World Series games, or scores from famous classical musicians.
As for myself, I know the moves, have a nice chess set, but could never get into the game to the point that I wanted to read about it and learn how to play it decently. Because there is no doubt that the game is as much read and analyzed, as it is played. The openings, defenses, attacks, end-games, all have references to famous games played by world champions.
Beth instinctively knows what to do, but she also reads about the game. Devours the texts. She becomes a formidable opponent, knocking over other older plays, mostly males. Few females in that era, or even now, are chess superstars.
Beth gets adopted by a couple in a loveless marriage. The father leaves, and the mother is well-meaning, but drinks. She does however encourage Beth to play, since there is prize money, and money is something they have little of after the husband leaves on business and never comes back.
Beth matures, and boys enter the picture, but not strong enough to dislodge her focus on chess. Not only is Beth a chess wunderkind, she is good looking, and loves nice clothes. And the series promotes the clothes line vigorously with a costume designer, Gabriele Binder who puts Beth in more smart looking outfits than Lesley Stall can wear in one '60 Minutes' segment. She is "smashing," as you would say of someone in that era.
In one scene she looks like the Julia Robert character in 'Pretty Woman' who has had a very good day at the stores, leaving with lots of shopping bags with handles of yarn.
One male, Benny, extremely cool looking with his leather hat and golden hair, takes Beth under his wing and trains her in New York for an upcoming tournament in Paris. Benny lives a Spartan life in a basement brownstone apartment, no doubt earning money from hustling games in Washington Square.
Benny lights Beth's fire, but doesn't sustain it. He's too much in love with himself and chess to let romance distract him. Beth, long addicted to tranquilizers that were a regimen of the orphanage to keep the kids calm, and booze, does have a dependency problem, and fights through it.
The acting is superb and the attention to detail is the best of any chess story. If 'The Queen's Gambit' doesn't help spark a new interest in the game, it would be a bit of a surprise. Certainly Beth's wardrobe in the series, already sparking fashion news in the NYT, will spawn some copycat looks.
It is a long time ago that interest in chess in this country peaked, led by Bobby Fischer's Icelandic matches against Boris Spassky in 1972. Fischer was the brash Brooklyn-bred New Yorker who was a chess prodigy, winning major tournaments at 13.
There was a story in my high school that Fischer visited the chess club at the school in the early '60s, played "simultaneous games" against I don't know how many opponents, and emerged the winner on all but one board. I don't know the kid's name who beat Fischer, but you can imagine the lifelong bragging rights he held after that.
The Fischer-Spassky matches created such an interest that when I left work for the day in 1972 and headed for my favorite watering hole, the Madison Avenue Blarney Stone, the guys at the bar were watching the games broadcast by the local PBS station, WNET, Channel 13. The cold war was still going on, and beating a Russian was always appreciated.
The broadcaster Shelby Lyman—who only recently passed away in 2019—had everyone's attention, explaining moves and moving the pieces around the TV set. You would have thought we were watching the Yankees. It was hard to order a drink.
It may take a turbo-charged boost to have chess gain new followers. When the 1961 movie 'The Hustler' hit the screen, based on Mr. Trevis's book, the sale of pool tables took off. Americans had cellars, and were willing to buy tables for recreation.
The movie, with its all-star cast of Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, George C. Scott, Murray Hamilton, Piper Laurie, Myron McCormack, with bartender bit parts played by the boxer Jake LaMotta and the Vincent Gardenia, was a gritty black and white success. After watching it, there wasn't anyone picking up a stick and chalking a tip who didn't imagine themselves sinking the break ball and running off 60 balls or so in straight pool as their opponent stewed in their seat.
I loved to play pool and spent many afternoon and evenings after high school in various pool parlors. I wrote of this in a posting in 2011
You have to admit that the placement of a chess set, game in progress, and a piano in the living room always add a certain amount of élan and class to the occupants who live there. If you've been watching the now airing miniseries 'The Undoing' on HBO starring Nicole Kidman, High Grant and Donald Sutherland, you can appreciate this. Kidman's character Grace Fraser, a high-priced Manhattan psychiatrist, is visiting her father in his obviously Fifth Avenue co-op with I'm sure a to-die-for-view of Central Park, moves a chess piece as she passes her father's setup board, then later joins him at the piano playing the right hand in a classical sonata. Grace has breeding.
As does Beth Harmon after she finishes her final game in Russia and glides into a park in Moscow, clad head-to-toe in a white fur ensemble with hat, and sits down and plays one of the old guys amongst the many who come to the park to seek opponents and play chess in the crisp Moscow air at one of the many tables arranged for the players.
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