Today is the 50th anniversary of the final game of the 1972 World Chess Championship that Bobby Fischer won against Boris Spassky. The game was suspended after 41 moves and Spassky resigned the next day, making Bobby Fischer the first American-born World Chess Champion. In the midst of the Cold War, an American winning over a Russian after decades of Soviet dominance of the game was a very big deal.
Pawn Sacrifice is the story of Bobby Fischer, particularly the time leading up to the 1972 World Championship match. Tobey Maguire plays the adult Bobby Fischer.
Fischer's two most frequent companions at this time are Paul Marshall and William Lombardy.
Marshall is a lawyer who helps Fischer navigate the complexities of the chess world - made more complex by Fischer's ever-escalating demands about how he wants his needs met during tournaments. Marshall is motivated by a desire to win the Cold War and a recognition that symbolic gestures, like chess tournaments, are the battle grounds.
Lombardy is a chess-playing Catholic priest who attempts to keep Bobby Fischer sane.
This film could have been presented with a sports movie plot, moving toward the triumphant underdog victory. We do see news footage of people celebrating in the US, but that's a long way from Iceland and the experience of Bobby Fischer.
Pawn Sacrifice is a bio-pic and Bobby Fischer's life was tragic, pretty much from beginning to end. It's not clear whether he ever had the capacity to live a good life, but his paranoia was certainly exacerbated by the times that he lived and the ways that he was used as a pawn in the Cold War.
I was 10 in 1972 and my brother was 9, so we have memories of this, although we were mostly sheltered from both the political implications of the match and from Bobby Fischer's odd behaviors that, now, we would recognize as mental health difficulties but at the time were usually seen as celebrity grandstanding or as unsportsmanlike attempts to psych out the opponent.
Dale and I went to see the new 1972 Fischer/Spassky exhibit at the World Chess Hall of Fame last week. Check back tomorrow for a review of that exhibit plus some of our chess-related memories.
Have you seen Pawn Sacrifice? What did you think?
About Joy Weese Moll
a librarian writing about books
