During the summer of 1972 the world was riveted by the cold war drama of the chess games in Iceland between the Soviet chess master Boris Spassky and his American challenger Bobby Fischer. I remember it well as I produced George Steiner's series of analyses of the contest for BBC Radio 3. Steiner's classic essay on the affair for the New Yorker was published in book form the following year as The Sport Scene: White Knights of Reykjavik. Liz Garbus's fascinating but rather low-key documentary traces Fischer's life from childhood prodigy to the burgeoning insanity that culminated in his lonely, isolated death as a paranoid, antisemitic and anti-American Jewish American in 2008. The centre and highpoint of his career is of course that successful challenge to Spassky at the age of 29 from which the madness stems. It is a tragic story, often painful to watch and listen to, with some eloquent, highly sympathetic testimony from other chess players and outstanding photographs of Fischer by his friend, the Scottish-born Life photojournalist Harry Benson, but little insight into the game of chess.
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