Belgian Chess History

Before Ben Kingsley, before Michael Ironside, before Lee Van Cleef even, the guy you went to if you wanted a memorable villain for your Hollywood movie was Bela Lugosi. Born in Hungary as Béla Blaskó, he is nowadays mainly remembered as the original Dracula, but he played in dozens of other movies, usually as the bad guy and more than once together with that other icon of thirties horror, Boris Karloff. In fact, I briefly talked about him before in this post about The black cat. In today’s subject, The invisible ghost, Lugosi plays a mister Kessler who has lost his wife in an accident and is now haunted by her ghost. Except that his wife is not really dead and that she is haunting him pretty much by accident. Where the ‘invisible’ in the title comes from remains unexplained.

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We will stay in the wonderful, whimsical world of the creature feature for just a while longer, but in contrast to last week’s Creature from the haunted sea, which was more or less forgotten as soon as it was released, The blob, which features a young Steve McQueen in the main role, has grown into a bit of a cult classic over the years. And it must ba said that it is a far better movie than would be suggested by the incredibly cheesy premise:¹ an alien, gelatinous blob crashes on Earth and starts consuming everything in its path. In movies likes this, usually the police gets involved at some point, but they, are of course, sceptical and have to be convinced of the existence of the eponymous monster. But there are shenanigans going on in the police department! The lieutenant opens a drawer from one of his men’s desks and finds a chess board:

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Long before Michael Bay and Steven Seagal were the schlockmeisters par excellence of the film world, way, way back in the swinging sixties, the b-movie scene was dominated by the incomparable Roger Corman. From the fifties to the seventies he directed a staggering amount of low-budget movies, reaching in 1957 alone an astonishing 9 movies. And with titles like Attack of the giant leeches, X: The man with the X-ray eyes, or The saga of the Viking women and their voyage to the waters of the great sea serpent you just know they’re going to be great! Of course, in such a tremendous amount of film, there is bound to be some chess scene somewhere and, indeed, shortly after the beginning of Creature from the haunted sea, one of his lesser known creature features, we can see a female spy in a shady bar playing chess against herself:

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