About a month-and-a-half ago somebody wrote in and requested that I review a German film called Schachnovelle (1960), directed by Gerd Oswald and starring Curd Jürgens. The only thing I could find was a PAL VHS tape with no subtitles, but I figured it was as good an excuse as any to test my rusty German – so I ordered it. It took about a month to arrive. Upon receiving it I put on a private screening for my parents, who both speak better German than I can pretend to master, and I’m happy to report that we all enjoyed the experience despite tracking problems with the tape that made it appear as if though every scene took place in a blizzard. 

“Schachnovelle” literally translates to “chess novella” and is based on, Die schachnovelle, a short fictional book by Austrian writer Stefan Zweig (1881 – 1942). Zweig was a pacifist who fled Austria in 1934, following Hitler’s rise to power. He moved to England and then the U.S. before stopping in Brazil, where he and his second wife, despairing over the future of Europe, committed suicide in 1942. A lot of Zweig’s work made it onto the big screen, including Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), directed by Max Ophüls. Schachnovella was released in the US as Brainwashed and in the UK as Three Moves to Freedom, but the original title is best as it points to the pivotal subject on which the whole story hinges.

Author Stefan Sweig.

The film puts a handful of characters on a ship, including one arrogant chess champion who (barely, and only when a large sum of money is offered) deigns to play a game against his fellow travellers. At first, his arrogance seems justified as he makes mincemeat of his opponents.  When a mysterious and anxious stranger (Jürgens) gravitates toward the chessboard, is if mesmerized, and begins offering winning advice, the chess champ is put on the defensive and is given a serious run for his money. Everyone is amazed and they assume that this odd stranger is also a champion chess player, but he shocks them all by announcing that this is the first time he’s ever played the game. And with this we go into a flashback: to 1938, Austria, where we see Jürgens character, Werner von Basil, in a very different light. Instead of an anxious and paranoid man with other odd behavioral mannerisms, we see a cool-headed, intellectual aristocrat socializing with high society – clearly a man of wealth and influence.

Basil’s champagne-sipping comfort zone comes to an abrupt halt when the Nazi’s storm the area and take him prisoner. Basil is put into a cramped and bare room for an extended period of solitary confinement that lasts several months. With nothing but a leaky faucet for company, Basil starts to crack under pressure and, at one point, offers to cooperate with Nazi intelligence. But as Basil stands by a coat-rack outside the office of his tormentors, he spies a book tucked away in the pocket of a raincoat and snatches it. Thus equipped with something to occupy his mind, he recants on his offer to cooperate and is tossed back into solitary confinement.

In my favorite scene of the film, once Basil is left alone in his room, he excitedly takes out his stolen treasure and opens the pages giddy with anticipation – and the look on his face says it all. His eyes widen in terror as he realizes that the book he’s pilfered is not a novel, but rather a collection of diagrams that map out famous chess games. At first he is furious, and then depressed, but then he realizes that even diagrams are better than nothing, and he begins to study them. With nothing else to do, these diagrams become his round-the-clock obsession. Even when the Nazis find the book and take it away from him, the diagrams have now been so well memorized that he is able to recreate them with molded bread-crumbs on his checkered bedspread, or even using patterns on the wall made by the shadows cast by his window pane.

The black-and-white cinematography by Günter Senftleben is first rate, and as my dad rightly pointed out, this is the kind of film that would have been ruined by color since black-and-white so perfectly embodies the game of chess itself. In one stand-out scene, Basil is escorted down a staircase and we see his bird’s-eye view of the tiled floor below, which in his fractured psyche takes on the appearance of a giant chessboard with the people in the lobby frozen in place like chess pieces. It reminded me Last Year at Marienbad, but since that came out later I wondered if perhaps Alain Resnais had seen and been influenced by this film in any way.

Prolific screen vet Curd Jürgens became an international star as Brigitte Bardot’s lover in Roger Vadimm’s And God Created Woman (1956) but was often typecast as a Germanic villain (be it a war movie or a James Bond film) – which is ironic, given how he abandoned Germany to become an Austrian citizen after being sent to a concentration camp for “political unreliables” due to anti-Nazi opinions. That background, obviously, made him the perfect actor to cast in this particular role, and he not only puts in a strong performance but is able to carry the film. (On a side note, I was fascinated to find out that Jürgens had five wives but, due to a car accident that damaged his spermatic cords, only one daughter with Eva Bartok – who he later found out was not his own but rather the result of an affair Bartok had with Frank Sinatra.)

My one complaint with Schachnovella is that Oswald’s direction did not properly convey to me the progression of time for Basil’s solitary confinement. One moment, Basil has his chess book and is studying it. The next it’s taken away from him and you’re left wondering how on earth he was able to memorize so many complicated diagrams. In an attempt to grant the film suspension of disbelief I’m left to guess that  maybe Basil had weeks, or even months, to peruse it. (My sense is that Zweig’s original story spent much more time letting the character soak in the chess book.) But this is a small quibble. As an enthusiastic book-worm who has often turned to books for solace, Schachnovella felt like a work made by kindred spirits.