This absurd comedy lampoons the chess boom of the 1920s in the young Soviet Union. A man is so obsessed with chess that he almost jeopardises his impending marriage. CHESS FEVER masterfully blends fictional scenes with documentary footage of an international chess tournament in Moscow and shows real chess greats such as world champion José Raúl Capablanca. It’s a humorous application of Lev Kulešov’s montage theories and an excellent example of Soviet film satire: light, playful and at the same time a mirror of Soviet society’s enthusiasm for chess.

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Like Komarov’s THE KISS OF MARY PICKFORD (1927), constructed from sequences documenting the actual visit to Moscow of Pickford and Fairbanks in 1926, in CHESS FEVER, location footage from the 1925 Moscow Chess tournament is edited into the story, showing the participants Capablanca, Grüfeld, Torré, Spielman and others. “Every photograph of the masters”, says the reviewer in Sovetskoe kino, “shows us a moment in the course of the play”. Capablanca, occasionally looking nervously to camera, was persuaded to appear in the film as a performing “type” (the “type”, that is, of Capablanca himself), alongside Anna Zemtsova. “By the editing together of the pictures he meets his heroine, befriends her and initiates her enthusiasm for chess”. Sovetskoe kino was appreciated of this highly profitable and successful film, which in Moscow and Leningrad equalled the best foreign hits: “The general enthusiasm for chess is making itself felt in cinema […] The comedy is pieced together as a parody of a newspaper story […] ordinary everyday matches acquire exaggerated scale: caricatures of the policeman, the cabman, of the chemist, the public at the tournament and others are wittily portrayed […] There is much humorous incident, much movement, the material forwarded pointedly by the serial story form.”
Amy Sargeant, Vsevolod Pudovkin. London/New York, 2000