Reviews

Search You Tube for Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Or just go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHg1W9kArwQ

I, too, saw this as part of the superb PBS series Academy Shorts (why isn't that series available!) and have longed to see it again, as well as many other of the works featured there.

It is a crying shame this and so many other superb short films are not available on DVD. I would love to have access to the library of the NFBC, for example, or much of the Academy Award nominees from years past (they could probably fit a decade's worth of nominees in a single DVD package.)

But until these become available for licensed purchase, You Tube will have to do. They offer this short in three parts, averaging about 8 minutes each.

My wife & I saw this as the second feature at a drive-in (yes, that long ago) and it has stayed with us long after we've forgotten the main feature that night. A marvelous game of cat & mouse between two chess-masters, with Voight as their pawn. We've looked for it on television, on tape and on DVD ever since, hoping to decide if it was as impressive as we thought. Schell's direction is superb, building and maintaining a constant tension throughout. The actors performances are, well, what you'd expect from these actors at the top of their game. Beginning with two young men circa WWII, one betting the other that he can get away with a murder, The End of the Game ranks with the best of Le Carre's work in its examination of a master detective's plot to finally catch his bete noir in a crime.