Word: chess
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Died. Nicholas Rossolimo, 65, Russian-born chess grand master; following an accidental fall; in Manhattan. Chess champion of France, Rossolimo came to the U.S. in 1952, when chess in America was less popular than it is today. Though his artistic, almost romantic style of play drew awards for "brilliancy" and won him the U.S. Open Championship in 1955, he was never able to make a living from the game and supplemented his tournament and chess-studio earnings by working as a Waldorf-Astoria busboy and a New York cabby...
...department store near Red Square at launch time to buy a TV set grumbled that the crowds kept her from the sales counter. Asked what he thought of Soyuz's successful liftoff, a stroller along Gorky Street replied: "Oh, has it all started?" A man absorbed in a chess game in a nearby park was just as blasé. "Chess is more difficult," he shrugged and turned back to his board...
Which is fitting, because Gene Hackman paces through this film like a rush hour shadow, mustached and anonymous, sitting in his car playing magnetic chess, inconspicuous in a plain coat and tie. Hackman works wonders with a part like this: when he isn't cast as the big blustering shove-around of Popeye Doyle or Scarecrow, or squandered in a mistake like The Poseidon Adventure, he's our best interpreter of the middle-class presence: not the hero, or the anti-hero, but the unhero, making his own blind...
...amorphous atmosphere of Night Moves, Moseby's inability to finish anything off makes sense. It's night that's moving--an inexplicable rumbling in the distance, and Moseby's delusion is that he's moving a knight in a chess game, check, check, check. But in fact the checkerboard is a great swarm, with no one heading anywhere. Moseby hasn't got a chance of wrestling this free-for-all into the neat conformity he likes: once his blocks are set up, the whole construct just tumbles down again...
...Clyde, and here he's much more easy going. He shoots a misty morning in Los Angeles like it's underwater, and the footage of the Florida Keys evokes the muggy, going-nowhere feeling of that place. People swim in this movie, too slippery and illogical for Moseby's chess game. One quick scene in the gigantic tank of a pro-football game is perfect--a dark walk through the tunnel into the bleary, intoxicating stadium--the roar and immensity give Moseby's quest all the more futility...