{"id":7334,"date":"2018-07-03T07:10:49","date_gmt":"2018-07-03T11:10:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7334"},"modified":"2018-07-26T08:06:42","modified_gmt":"2018-07-26T12:06:42","slug":"the-catcher-was-a-spy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7334","title":{"rendered":"The Catcher Was a Spy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"TheIt might almost be worth seeing the new movie Gotti<\/em> with a sneering John Travolta in the lead, simply because it has received a (surprisingly) rare \u201c0\u201d rating from Rotten Tomatoes critics. Unanimity about a movie\u2019s goodness or apparent awfulness is so rarely achieved that this may be a cinematic low-water-mark. A filmic Sahara. A future cult classic.<\/p>\n

Last weekend, I went to another movie most critics have panned, because it is crammed with components I like: spies! history! Nazis! baseball! Based on a book by Nicholas Dawidoff, it recounts a bit of the true story of Red Sox catcher Moe Berg and was directed by Ben Lewin (who gets most of the blame), with a good script by Robert Rodat (trailer<\/a>).<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t perfect, and maybe it\u2019s slow for action film devotees, but the acting was superior. Paul Rudd played Berg, a man who loved baseball and had a great smile, but was hard to know. Through his Princeton connections, he was recruited to the fledgling OSS by its head Wild Bill Donovan (Jeff Daniels), mostly because of his facility with languages and despite his somewhat ambiguous sexuality. He has a girlfriend in Boston (Sienna Miller) for much of the film, but that\u2019s an on-again, off-again thing, first with his baseball travel schedule, then his work in Washington and overseas.<\/p>\n

Finally he gets the kind of assignment he craves: the U.S. has the Manhattan Project to develop a nuclear weapon, and the Allies believe the Germans are attempting this too, led by Werner Heisenberg (Mark Strong). But they can\u2019t be certain (sorry). Berg is teamed up with a military man (Guy Pearce) and a physicist (excellent work by Paul Giamatti) to find out. If these suspicions are correct, Berg is to assassinate him. Unlike so many celluloid spies, Rudd’s Berg seems actually to weigh the significance of this assignment.<\/p>\n

In a key scene early in the film, Berg signals the pitcher, but the pitcher waves him off. The opponent on first tries to steal second, but Berg manages to get the ball there in time to throw him out, ending the inning. Walking back to the dugout, he says to the pitcher, \u201cNever ignore my signal when a man\u2019s going to try to steal second.\u201d Pitcher: \u201cHow\u2019d you know he\u2019d try?\u201d \u201cI just knew.\u201d Berg\u2019s skill in sizing up people was perfect for the OSS.<\/p>\n

Rex Reed<\/a> in the New York Observer<\/em> said, it\u2019s \u201ca juicy story told blandly,\u201d but still a movie worth seeing, and I agree. Maybe Gotti<\/em> should get a second look.<\/p>\n

Rotten Tomatoes<\/a> critics rating: 32%; audiences 67%.
\n<\/a>\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It might almost be worth seeing the new movie Gotti with a sneering John Travolta in the lead, simply because it has received a (surprisingly) rare \u201c0\u201d rating from Rotten Tomatoes critics. Unanimity about a movie\u2019s goodness or apparent awfulness … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"The Catcher Was a Spy - you may like this film more than the critics have. I did!!","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[265,193,266,57,1172,104],"tags":[1351,1350,1352,415,129],"class_list":["post-7334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biography","category-espionage","category-history","category-movies","category-sports","category-the-morgue","tag-baseball","tag-moe-berg","tag-physics","tag-thriller","tag-wars-and-conflicts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1Ui","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7334"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7334\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7338,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7334\/revisions\/7338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}