Year Released: 2020
Written Screenplay and Directed by: Scott Frank
Starring: Anya Taylor-Joy, Marielle Heller, Harry Melling, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Moses Ingram, Jacob Fortune-Lloyd
(R–TV MA, 7 episodes ranging from 46 to 67 min.)
Genre: Period Drama

“It’s an entire world of just 64 squares. I feel safe in it. I can control it. I can dominate it. And it’s predictable, so if I get hurt, I only have myself to blame.” –Beth Harmon

Two thousand twenty astounded us, even in minor ways. A nation once addicted to car chases, and superheroes relished a film that is very still and intellectual, spending endless screen time fixated – like its titular heroine – on chess, an entire world of “just 64 squares.”

Forty-seven years after it appeared in novel form and 46 years after its author died, The Queen’s Gambit is suddenly a big hit.

The Netflix original is based on the 1983 novel The Queen’s Gambit, by Walter Tevis, who also wrote 3 other novels that made it to the big screen The Hustler (novel 1959, film 1961) The Color of Money (novel 1961, film 1984), and The Man Who Fell to Earth (novel 1963, film 1976).

Of course, the only big screens for The Queen’s Gambit are the oversized TVs adorning living rooms and bedrooms across America. And maybe now is the time for such a film to share the intimacy of our inner chambers. As Marshal McLuhan told us in 1964’s The Medium is the Message, television is a “cool medium,” expecting more analysis from the audience than the “hot medium” theatrical films where we are more passive consumers.

So we take in a sexy Fast Eddie (Paul Newman) hustling pool halls on the big screen, but are content to actively observe chess, the more cerebral competition, with no big star power on our TVs.

And even those of us (probably 98% of the audience) who know little or nothing about chess follow the pawns, rooks, knights, and queens slide across the board with an infectious fascination we catch from the rags to riches little orphan – like Annie, she is a redhead, too – Beth Harmon (Ana Taylor-Joy).

Of course, like the high-class Downton’s Abbey we also have enough melodrama and vibrant personalities to suck us in. Starting with the brief flashback that shows us just how little nine-year-old Elizabeth Harmon (Isla Johnston) becomes an orphan in the first place. A grisly head-on car crash with a mute Beth the sole survivor standing numbed on the bridge.

“She’s lucky. She got off without a scratch,” the state trooper marvels.

But his companion is a bit wiser. Glancing at the covered corpse that used to be Beth’s mother, he replies, “I bet she might not see it that way.”

The orphanage, a Kentucky Christian home called The Methuen Home for Girls, is not a “May I have some more, sir?” Oliver Twist or Jane Eyre dungeon of starving waifs, but it does have some problems. They have plenty of food, though it is of the dreadful institutional variety, and topped off at breakfast with a somewhat kindly Black orderly taking Nurse Ratchet’s place as the pill dispenser. It turns out that the green ones are the best, as Jolene (Moses Ingram), a witty and warm fellow orphan, tells Beth. Thus Beth begins to save them for before bed as Jolene recommends, even hording them to take several at once

The institution and the pills are probably a reference to author Walter Tevis’s own childhood, as were the pool hall focus of two other novels:

He developed a rheumatic heart condition, so his parents placed him in the Stanford Children’s Convalescent home (and given heavy doses of phenobarbital), for a year, during which time they returned to Kentucky, where the Tevis family had been given an early land grant in Madison County. Walter traveled across country alone by train at age 11 to rejoin his family in Kentucky. He made friends with Toby Kavanaugh, a fellow high school student, and learned to shoot pool in the Kavanaugh mansion in Lawrenceburg. In the library there, he read science fiction for the first time.They remained lifelong friends. Kavanaugh later became the owner of a pool roomin Lexington, which would have an impact on Tevis’ writing

***

Several characters usher Beth through her formative years. Mr. Shaibel (Bill Camp) is the chess-playing custodian whom Beth observes when she goes down to the basement to dust off erasers. At first he is aloof and shuns her, but when she tells him what she already knows about the game by simply watching him, Shaibel agrees to let her into his subterranean chess world. He also teaches her the game’s etiquette, such as turning the queen on its side as a way of conceding the match. Soon she outdoes this early teacher and astounds all at the local public school by playing simultaneous matches with the entire (all male) chess team, defeating them all.

Several years later when she is a teenager, Beth is adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Wheatley, who it turns out, don’t have much of a marriage. Mrs. Wheatley (Marielle Heller), at first aloof like Shaibel, begins to warm to Beth when her traveling salesman husband finally “slips his lead” and tells her his travels are now permanent.

“Though I’m no longer a wife, except by a legal fiction, I believe I can learn to be a mother.”

And when Beth as a complete novice actually wins the state tournament along with some much needed cash, Mrs. Wheatley finally begins to sees Beth’s chess obsession as positive, arranging travel details for the two as a team. In fact, as Beth eats the airplane food off a plastic tray on their trip home –traveling on Christmas day is considerably cheaper – she tells her mother, as she finally begins to calls Alma Wheatley, “This is the best Christmas I have ever had.”

But it is the cadre of chess players whom Beth serially humiliates in competition who ultimately become her mentors. And in a sense they are all, at least for a time, romantic interests as well. They see her genius but also her arrogance and self-destructive nature, as she lets her emotions, along with plenty of alcohol and the always present little green pills, lead into spirals of self-destruction.

Harry Beltik (Harry Melling), the first master chess player she defeats, sees the inner rage that fuels and fells her.

"Anger is a potent spice. A pinch wakes you up. Too much dulls your senses." Harry Beltik

Benny Watts (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) “a brash young man who is the reigning United States chess champion and one of Beth's most challenging competitors, later a mentor and friend,” takes her on when she is at a lowest point.

Benny Watts: You always drink this much?
Beth Harmon: Sometimes, I drink more.

He swoops her away to his pad in New York for his own personal chess camp, so to speak, but under his rules. No booze and no sex. They adhere to at least one of these rubrics.

But Townes ((Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) is the one Beth sets her cap for. Too bad the photo session in his Las Vegas hotel room is interrupted by his “room mate” just as things are getting interesting.

But when Beth is at her lowest, it is not one of the guys, but her old orphanage friend Jolene who comes to the rescue. She lets Beth know that Mr. Shaibel has died, and their trek to his funeral and Beth’s impetuous trip to the basement room where they first played the game, helps Beth to slay a few of the demons that haunt her.

Jolene also sets the arrogant girl straight, at first disclaiming, "I'm not your Guardian Angel. I'm not here to save you. Hell, I can barely save me."

But then she hits the target, recognizing what may be Beth’s fatal flaw.

"You've been the best at what you do for so long, you don't even know what it's like for the rest of us."

Beth has seen her greatest enemy, and it is not Vasily Borgov (Marcin Coroncinski) the Russian world champion, but herself. Will that knowledge help her in their final contest in Moscow?

***

The meticulous sets, cars, and fashions place us right there with Beth as she travels through the 50s and 60s, the stomping grounds of Different Drummer’s own youth. However, the film puts its own spin on that era, and in certain cases it rings false, uni-dimensional, and even artificial.

The 50s fashions at the Kentucky high school – brown and white saddle shoes and twin sweater sets for the girls, for example – seem a bit contrived. At my Illinois high school during that era, we wore penny loafers and certainly a wider variety of clothes, but maybe in Kentucky that was the uniform. A minor quibble, at best.

The film does, however, an exquisite job on the high fashion as Beth becomes more and more successful, especially the dual chromatic outfits that echo the black and white of the chessboard, and the final all white ensemble mirroring her status as the white queen of chess.

But the role of women, especially the dour portrait of the role of housewife and mother, projects Hollywood’s perpetual diminishment of family life back then. The women, particularly in the case of Beth’s adoptive mother, are bored with being at home and portrayed as unhappy alcoholics, demeaned by controlling husbands who overlook their talents.

And in typical Hollywood fashion, Christians are stereotyped as marginally kooky dullards, or in the case of the director of the Christian Methune Home for Girls, dogmatic with a dash of repressed sadism thrown in for good measure.

However, the Soviets are held in high regard by the American chess players, who envy the Russian state paying them to play. Also, they note that the Russians work together like a team, while the Americans are too focused on themselves, their individualism demeaned, while the Soviet group think is lauded. So, too, with the State Department representative who accompanies Beth to Moscow. His purpose seems to be looking for signs that the Russian champion might defect, or at least using Beth to parrot her love for America at his insistence.

The final scene, where she shuns her State Department minder – that’s actually how they play him – and leaves the chauffeured car to walk among the Russians playing chess on the sidewalk, seems orchestrated by Hollywood and Netflix in the same way they project that the State Department is trying to orchestrate Beth.

That these Russians love her and cheer her win over their own champion seems something out of the “reel” world of Hollywood instead of the realpolitik that controlled American Soviet relations at the time.

But of course, Hollywood is so adept at this subtle persuasion and demeaning of that American era, that many of you reading this were probably at best only marginally aware of this spin as you binged all seven episodes.

Still a well done series, enhanced by a good script and fine acting, but flawed by its lapses into stereotypes when it suits Netflix’s view of a world probably none in their employ even lived through.

–Kathy Borich
🥁🥁🥁1/2

Trailer

Film-Loving Foodie

Beth Harmon starts out small, in the basement of an orphanage in Kentucky, where the school janitor teachers her chess. Later on, she hits the chess circuit big time, traveling to Las Vegas, Mexico City, Moscow, and Paris.

The hotels are top notch with almost anything she desires to feast upon. Of course, Beth is more interested in watching imaginary chess pieces that magically appear on the ceiling as she lies in bed planning her moves. That, or taking some little green pills and washing them down with plenty of red wine.

Let’s imagine what she could have eaten instead. And I say, let’s go with the culinary capital of the world, Paris. Here are a few of Different Drummer’s earlier French favorites:

Different Drummer’s own French Pot in the Fire (Beauty and the Beast)

French Potato Salad (Quartet)

Sautéed Sole Meuniere (Tell No One)

Crème Brulee (The Blue Room)

Chocolate Crème Brulee with Fresh Raspberries (Marie Antionette)

Chicken Cordon Bleu (Cache)

French Rabbit Stew Recipe (Jean de Florette)

What to cook for our Chess Queen? Beth does flirt with a gleaming cabinet of French pastries while in Paris. Let’s create one for her. Its real name is Cherry Buttermilk Claroutis, but we simply call it French Cherry Buttermilk Custard.

“Sweet-tart cherries elevate the otherwise straightforward custard, and buttermilk lends a welcome tang.” –Kimberley Hasselbrink

French Cherry Buttermilk Custard

Ingredients

· 1/2 cup natural cane sugar, divided

· 16 ounces sweet cherries, pitted

· 3 eggs

· 1 1/4 cups buttermilk

· 1/3 cup almond flour

· 2 tablespoons brown rice flour or all-purpose flour

· 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

· 2 teaspoons finely grated fresh ginger

· Fine sea salt

· Powdered sugar, for dusting

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 375°. Grease a 9" pie pan with unsalted butter. Sprinkle with 1 tablespoon sugar.

2. Arrange cherries in a single layer on bottom of pan. Set aside.

3. In a bowl, whisk together eggs, buttermilk, remaining sugar, almond flour, brown rice flour, vanilla, ginger, and 1/4 teaspoon salt until smooth. Pour evenly over fruit.

4. Bake about 50 minutes, until golden brown around edges and set in center. Test by inserting a toothpick in center-if it comes out clean, the clafoutis is ready.

5. Allow to cool slightly, then dust with powdered sugar and serve.

Epicurious.com