Original title: Shakhmatnaya goryachka
Year: 1925
Runtime: 27 minutes
Country: Soviet Union
Language: Silent (background music)
Subtitles: English & Russian inter-titles
Genre: Comedy | Short

Director: Vsevolod Pudovkin, Nikolai Shpikovsky

Cast:
Boris Barnet … Thief
José Raúl Capablanca … The World Champion
Zakhar Darevsky
Konstantin Eggert
Vladimir Fogel … The Hero
Natalya Glan
Ernst Grunfeld … Himself
F. Ivanov
Sergei Komarov … Grandfather
Ivan Koval-Samborsky … Policeman
Anatoli Ktorov … Tram Passenger
Frank Marshall … Himself
Yakov Protazanov … Chemist
Yuli Raizman … Chemist’s Assistant
Richard Reti … Himself
Rudolph Spielmann … Himself
Carlos Torre … Himself
F.D. Yates … Himself
Anna Zemtsova … The Heroine
Mikhail Zharov … House Painter

Plot/Synopsis:

With an international chess tournament in progress, a young man becomes completely obsessed with the game. His fiancée has no interest in it, and becomes frustrated and depressed by his neglect of her, but wherever she goes she finds that she cannot escape chess. On the brink of giving up, she meets the world champion, Capablanca himself, with interesting results.

Though not his first film, Russian director/cinema theorist V. I. Pudovkin’s Chess Fever (Shakhmatanya goryachka) was the first to be released. Essentially a comedy, this 2-reel exercise in montage manages to make the game of chess seem thoroughly cinematic. Illustrating his theory that “The foundation of film art is editing”, Pudovkin uses apparently unrelated images to fashion a smooth, well-integrated unified whole. He goes so far as to rabbet in shots of legendary chess master Capablanca so that his film will have a “star”. Chess Fever was but a prologue for the Pudovkin masterpieces to come: Mother (1926), The End of St. Petersburg (1927) and Storm Over Asia (1928 ). — Allmovie.com

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