FILM

USA 2011 96 mins Dir: Liz Garbus

The virulently anti-Semitic son of a Jewish communist, Bobby Fischer was described by friends and foes alike as pushy, self-centred, arrogant and weird. He was also a conspiracy theorist par excellence and famously described 9/11 as "wonderful news. It's time for the fucking US to get their heads kicked in." Yes, it's safe to say that Fischer's name would be absent from most lists of sympathetic documentary subjects. But he was also a chess 'genius' - if we must employ that over-used term - whose 'Match of the Century' against Soviet champ Boris Spassky in Iceland back in 1972 was considered so significant in Cold War terms that it bumped Watergate off the top of US TV news.

Made for HBO, Liz Garbus's appropriately TV-sized documentary takes the traditional Rock'n'Roll Years approach, combining archive newsreel footage, contemporary music (including, brilliantly, 'Your Move' by Yes - one of the handful of songs to reference chess) and new interviews with surviving participants. It's a nuts and bolts approach which works well in showing how chess fever improbably gripped the nation (even softcore dolly birds were photographed poring over knights and rooks). Footage of the obsessive Fischer as a clean-cut kid suggests a borderline Asperger's personality from an early age. Much off-the-shelf genius/madness guff and half-baked theorising about Absent Dad Trauma are used to explain his later disappearances and eccentricities. But the film rather races through those interesting post-fame years when increasingly paranoid Fischer abandoned Christian fundamentalism to embrace the fake Protocols of Elders of Zion. Still, it's interesting to find that so many chess grand masters go bonkers. Particularly delicious is the story of the one who claimed to have played a game against god - and thrashed him. (Robin Askew)

website bobbyfischermovie.co.uk/

Opens: July 15

Copyright Robin Askew 2011