DVD & BluRay

THE CATCHER WAS A SPY Signature, cert 15; On Digital download

If you thought you had read, or seen, every story of spies during WW2, then think again.

This is an amazing true story. In 1938 the Nazis recruited Nobel Prize winning physicist Werner Heisenberg to build them an atomic bomb. After the attack on Pearl Harbour by the Japanese which drew America into the war, the US desperately wanted more information on the development of the bomb, and should Heisenberg plan to put such a weapon in the hands of the Germans, he was to be assassinated.

It’s the spy who was chosen for the mission that’s astonishing, it went to one of America’s greatest baseball stars, Morris ‘Moe’ Berg

(Paul Rudd pictured with Sienna Miller) a Boston Red Sox player who before the war ironically joined legendary Babe Ruth’s allAmerican team that went on a goodwill tour of Japan. Now recruited and trained by the OSS, which was to develop into the CIA, Moe was about as unlikely a spy to send into the lair of the Gestapo as you could imagine, because he was a Jew.

But this was a baseball player with brains as well as a magic catching glove, he spoke seven languages and had studied at elite universities before going into sports. He was also gay, a fact he kept from girlfriend Estella (Sienna Miller) and his military liaison (Jeff Daniels). Meeting Heisenberg (Mark Strong) in Zurich while he was under observation by his Nazi masters called for all of Moe’s legendary cool head under pressure, and capture was unthinkable. This sturdy drama is superbly acted and tense with no flashy gimmicks.

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