THE CATCHER WAS A SPY is about 90% a very good movie. The
other 10% is just annoying.
Some of you probably know just from the title that this movie is about Moe Berg, a journeyman major league baseball catcher during the 1920s and ’30s. He was an interesting character, having attended Princeton, learned numerous languages, and deliberately cultivated a mysterious air about himself. Not surprisingly, his nickname was “Professor”. He even became a minor celebrity for appearing on a radio quiz show.
And at some point—we’re not sure when, possibly even before World War II—he went to work for Wild Bill Donovan at the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the C.I.A. His primary mission, on which he worked with several other agents, was finding out how close Germany was to developing a working atomic bomb, and eventually he was assigned to assassinate Werner Heisenberg, the scientist in charge of the German effort, if he deemed it necessary.
All this is a matter of history, and the movie does an excellent job of playing out that part of the story. The pace is leisurely but never boring, and the cast, led by the always likable Paul Rudd as Moe Berg, is top-notch. Production values are high. All that is the 90% that works.
The 10% that doesn’t occurs when the director and screenwriter, out of the blue, decide that Moe Berg must have been gay, something that none of his biographers or the director of a documentary about him, give any credence to whatsoever. It’s like they sat down and said, “Oh, he never got married and he was kind of secretive about his life . . . so he must have been gay! Yeah, let’s go with that!” And so we get a few scenes clumsily shoehorned into the movie that almost feel like they came from a diffferent film. Rudd doesn’t even come across like he believes those scenes. In those moments his performance seems like he’s saying to the audience, “Yeah, I’m only doing this because these guys told me to. I don’t buy it, either.”
I realize this is more of a rant than I normally post. Despite the reservations, I enjoyed THE CATCHER IS A SPY. Sometimes it’s nice to watch a movie that’s not all CGI and explosions (although there are some of those in the World War II sequences, which are very well done).
Some of you probably know just from the title that this movie is about Moe Berg, a journeyman major league baseball catcher during the 1920s and ’30s. He was an interesting character, having attended Princeton, learned numerous languages, and deliberately cultivated a mysterious air about himself. Not surprisingly, his nickname was “Professor”. He even became a minor celebrity for appearing on a radio quiz show.
And at some point—we’re not sure when, possibly even before World War II—he went to work for Wild Bill Donovan at the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the C.I.A. His primary mission, on which he worked with several other agents, was finding out how close Germany was to developing a working atomic bomb, and eventually he was assigned to assassinate Werner Heisenberg, the scientist in charge of the German effort, if he deemed it necessary.
All this is a matter of history, and the movie does an excellent job of playing out that part of the story. The pace is leisurely but never boring, and the cast, led by the always likable Paul Rudd as Moe Berg, is top-notch. Production values are high. All that is the 90% that works.
The 10% that doesn’t occurs when the director and screenwriter, out of the blue, decide that Moe Berg must have been gay, something that none of his biographers or the director of a documentary about him, give any credence to whatsoever. It’s like they sat down and said, “Oh, he never got married and he was kind of secretive about his life . . . so he must have been gay! Yeah, let’s go with that!” And so we get a few scenes clumsily shoehorned into the movie that almost feel like they came from a diffferent film. Rudd doesn’t even come across like he believes those scenes. In those moments his performance seems like he’s saying to the audience, “Yeah, I’m only doing this because these guys told me to. I don’t buy it, either.”
I realize this is more of a rant than I normally post. Despite the reservations, I enjoyed THE CATCHER IS A SPY. Sometimes it’s nice to watch a movie that’s not all CGI and explosions (although there are some of those in the World War II sequences, which are very well done).
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