Silence of the Pawns (ACJ 1)

Silence of the Pawns: A Review of Knight Moves

Jamie Hamilton

Knight Moves
Directed by Carl Schenkel
Written by Brad Mirman
Starring Christopher Lambert, Diane Lane, Tom Skerrit, Daniel Baldwin
Republic Pictures, 1993, 108 minutes, rated R
Available on video

Chess is so often portrayed inaccurately in the media that it's a minor thrill when you see they've set up the board correctly. To the untutored mind, it would appear a simple matter just to reproduce a grandmaster game if you're showing grandmasters playing chess, but I've only seen it done once, in the James Bond movie From Russia with Love. There's also some kind of law in Hollywood that if chess is involved, you have to show the following scene:

Two men hunched over a randomly ordered chessboard.
First Player (reaches out, pushes a piece forward): Check!
Close shot of second player, who glances up with a hunted look and makes a hurried move.
First Player (leans over the board, gingerly lifts a piece, plants it calmly, announces triumphantly ...): Checkmate!

Knight Moves, a chess-oriented movie scheduled for release in January 1993, of course includes this de rigueur scene. It's also got plenty of cliched characters, such as the small town "no-nonsense" police chief (played by Tom Skerrit), the fly-off-the-handle-at-any-provocation detective (Daniel Baldwin), and the inexperienced young female psychologist (Diane Lane) who falls in love with the prime suspect. You could almost assemble the movie from stock footage if it weren't for the main character: a top grandmaster who's in the lead at the world championship candidates' tournament.

Christopher Lambert, Lane's husband in real life, whom you may remember from his debut as Tarzan (in the Greystoke version), ascends the evolutionary ladder with ease to portray Grandmaster Peter Sanderson. His character is by far the most interesting in the movie, and has some solid lines, as when he echoes Kasparov's comments about the surprising psychological violence inherent in chess.

The movie is set on a small Pacific Northwest resort island where the world championship candidates tournament is being held. During the event, a serial killer begins stalking the town's young women, and initial clues point to Sanderson. Short of funds, and somehow without help from state or federal agencies, the local police enlist the psychologist to covertly assess Sanderson. Suppressing her own suspicions of his guilt, she promptly falls in love with him. With her Female Intuition and his Powerful Chess Mind, they go about deciphering the killer's clues.

The plot, however, just doesn't hold water, though there's a lot of it on the floor in some loosely justified basement scenes. In a promising opening scene--set perhaps by coincidence in 1972--in which a pen literally takes on the role of a sword, the film pokes gruesome fun at the emotional strains of junior chess competition. But the writers rapidly jump off the deep end and never swim back to shore. The way the clues are parceled out, the viewer never has any hope of figuring out the killer's game. The police behave with inexplicable arbitrariness, and the phone-trace angle just fizzles out. (They should have ordered caller ID from the phone company.)

It's nice to see a fashionably-dressed grandmaster in a romantic lead, with beautiful women falling into bed with him at the slightest provocation. (On the other hand, he is suspected of commiting several extremely grotesque murders.) Chess players will probably be pleased to see the game in the public eye, and happy to have some stereotypes about the game contradicted on the big screen, but annoyed to see others reinforced (for one, the players are older than they should be), and at all the little mistakes only those in the know could pick up on.

Even though there is a "chess advisor" listed in the credits, the players make illegal moves and the positions shown don't match the announced moves. The people who made this movie obviously didn't take the time to get to know the chess world. Why, for example, would any writer make up chess opening names? Knight Moves is hardly the only production to do this; in fact, it seems to be the rule rather than the exception, but is it really possible to improve on the King's Gambit, the Poisoned Pawn Variation, the Bogo-Indian, for God's sake? (The writers of this movie had the poetic fancy to dream up the "Number Two Variation.") To their credit, however, they did inadvertently illustrate the tendency of chess-book writers to overdo their clever quips and sayings: A key plot element involves the "three rules" of how to play chess proposed by a made-up famous player: "Carefully, carefully, carefully." Maybe the writers came to movies from the real estate business.

The chess world has so many fascinating characters that it's a shame more of them haven't ended up on film. The real-life Gary Kasparov, for example, is much more compelling than Peter Sanderson. Knight Moves has one humorously superstitious grandmaster who wears a hat made of aluminum foil, but he's only a pale imitation of Viktor Korchnoi, whose match with Maroczy is the first concrete evidence of chess after death.

Director Carl Schenkel, who brought us such classics as Silence Like Glass and Silhouette, and Republic Pictures, generally a B-grade movie mill, probably intend Knight Moves for the rental market. If so, with any luck they'll extend the two short sex scenes to create an unrated version and earn an "under-17 restricted" sticker on the video-store cassette box.

According to Vanity Fair, this film "threatens to do for chess what Silence of the Lambs did for dressmaking." But certainly not what it did at the Oscars. Knight Moves isn't a bad movie; it has some high points, but mostly it just goes by and then you forget about it. Still, chess players might want to see it even if they don't add the sex scenes.

Jamie Hamilton is a USCF master who has written for Chess Life and many other publications. His review of Fresh was published in ACJ 3.

This article appears in ACJ 1 (1992), pp. 105-107.