That’s terrible advice. Clearly, you should rage in the late afternoon. At that point, most people have already had a stressful day and are ready to finally get work over with and head home. If you start raging then, you will be much more effective and you will be able to irritate people so effectively that John Cleese would be proud. So Rage at dawn is bad advice, but is it a good movie? Eh. It’s not bad, for sure. It’s not great either, but it’s closer to being great than to being bad.1 It’s pretty much a standard fifties westerns. Four bandit brothers in the command of the highly corrupt local judge are terrorising the neighbouring communities. Something needs to be done.
It’s always a sad state of affairs when something needs to be done. But the guy charged with actually doing something has a brilliant idea: he plays chess! That counts, right? That must count. And so we find him sitting at the board one day, waiting for the judge’s man to take him in and get him into contact with the bandit brothers.
While the chessboard is properly centred, the quality of the images I’ve seen is not sufficient to give a fully reliable reconstruction. The black pieces seem to stand out a little more and as a result I am pretty confident about them. The white pieces are another matter altogether.2
This seems to be the first position we see. Black plays Nc6, and our hero responds with Bb6. Why? Who knows! Presumably, there is a prize for ridiculousness. Or perhaps they’re just biding time until it is dawn and they can start raging.
Realism: 2/5 No, this is not realistic. Pieces are hanging everywhere and no one seems to care. On the other hand, the position is locally logical and the moves played are legal.
Probable winner: White, since black is strewing pieces left and right.
1. [But it’s quite far from either. It’s disturbingly close to mediocre, though.] ↩
2. [If you’re raging every dawn because you can’t find a good diagram editor, fear no more.] ↩