As actors become older, it becomes harder for them to find roles in mainstream movies. So if you’re shooting a film that is set in a retirement home, you can get a much better cast than you’d normally would. Consequently, when they decided to film Osman’s best-seller The Thursday murder club, which is about a handful of old people solving murder cases, they got an unbelievably star-studded cast. Just look at those names: Helen Mirren! Ben Kingsley! Pierce Brosnan!1
Helen Mirren’s character has a husband who is suffering from dementia. But he still plays chess! The first time we see him at work is some fifteen minutes into the movie. He doesn’t have an opponent, and his position appears to be the following:2
He’s sitting on the white side, but that probably doesn’t mean much. He seems to have a newspaper or magazine open and is presumably going over a game analysed therein. But what demented sort of newspaper would print this diagram is beyond me. Perhaps the poor man made it himself but doesn’t remember.
We see him again almost an hour later. This time, he’s playing a Polish young man who was doing all sorts of shady handiwork for the retirement home’s murdered owner. Our man is also getting slaughtered:
At first glance, this may look perfectly normal, but there’s that pesky second glance spoiling everything again. How could white have fallen into this mating net? Was he trying to end it all? Or perhaps he had to choose between recapturing a piece and getting mated and preferred the latter.3
But third time’s the charm! Close to the end of the movie, we see the same two opponents going at it once more. The old man again has white and has reached this position:
Things are looking much better for him now. He has won a pawn somewhere and, although the conversion is far from trivial, he has very good prospects. He should probably play Be5 soonish, though, because Ne4 could quickly turn them into conspects.
Realism: 2/5, 3/5 & 4/5 Rarely do you see a movie move from poor to good as it progresses, but here we have such a case. The first position is quite unbelievable, the second one looks like someone was trying to make up a position that didn’t look too obviously wrong, and the third one looks like it may have come from an actual game.
Probable winner: For the final one, white has the best papers. In the second one, black has already won. In the first one, my intuition is uselessly crying in a corner somewhere. White has the bishop pair, but black has the centre, is better developed, and white’s queen’s bishop is hanging. So perhaps black is better?
1. [On second thought, please don’t.] ↩
2. [The diagram editor club recommends this one.] ↩
3. [The sly old dog!] ↩