Coming to Squirrel Hill: A masterful film about Moe Berg
Lamenting in this space not two months ago that Aviva Kempner’s latest film project hadn’t yet received its Pittsburgh debut, I’m relieved to see things are about to be rectified beginning Friday night.
With either a colossal coincidence measured by about 99 years or an irony that just happens to inform so much of what Ms. Kempner has done as one of this country’s most decorated documentarians, the Manor Theater in Squirrel Hill will be the platform for “The Spy Behind Home Plate,” her masterful, soaring treatment of the incredible life of Moe Berg.
“A hundred years ago, or maybe it was 1920, my father came to Pittsburgh from Lithuania,” Ms. Kempner was telling me on the phone the other day. “It turns out that Lithuanian Jews went to Pittsburgh, just as now Ethiopians and Salvadorans tend to come to Washington. My father was the youngest of 10 and the first in his family to go to college, at the University of Pittsburgh.
“I grew up in Detroit, but I can remember being driven to Squirrel Hill to see relatives. My father passed 43 years ago, but I still have warm memories of Pittsburgh.”
Ms. Kempner was so upset by last fall’s Tree of Life synagogue massacre she situated 17 empty chairs on her big front lawn near Washington, D. C. — 11 for the dead and six more for those injured by the shooter. The
dedication in the closing credits for “The Spy Behind Home Plate” supports tighter gun control laws, immigration reform and the viability of newspapers. Ms. Kempner lists the Parkland, Fla., students and the Tree of Life synagogue worshipers among those in whose loving memory the film was made.
The film, set mostly in the 1930s and ‘ 40s, debuts eight blocks from the Tree of Life crime scene and opens with what is so tragically topical — anti- Semitism right out in the open.
Such was the climate that made Moe Berg play baseball under an assumed name ( Runty Wolf) in his amateur days, and he was so accomplished a player at Princeton that he was invited to join one of the university’s prestigious clubs, but only so long as he pledged not to recruit other Jews. He refused to join.
As I mentioned here in June, Berg’s uniquely American story has also been presented in the 2018 feature film “The Catcher Was a Spy,” starring Paul Rudd as Berg, a most worthy vehicle by any critical measure. But Ms. Kempner’s documentary is playing a different sport, if you will, and the more precise results should have deep historical resonance.
Ironically, ( that word, again), Ms. Kempner, as writer, producer and director, uses some actual Hollywood footage to help propel the narrative here.
“My motivation there was that this is an area where Hollywood really gets it right,” she said. “If Hollywood made great film noir vehicles on the OSS, of course you’re going to use them.”
Following a 15- year career as a big league catcher, it was when Berg joined the OSS ( the precursor of the CIA) that his capacious brain launched him toward a nearly indescribable World War II odyssey. Educated at Princeton, Columbia Law and the Sorbonne and fluent in more than seven languages, he would ultimately be judged by those at the highest levels of U. S. intelligence as the optimal candidate to determine whether German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg had taken the Nazis to the brink of nuclear capability.
And, if that were the case, to kill him.
In “The Spy Behind Home Plate,” we gain an ever-clearer understanding of the pressures, the urgency, and the sprawling scientific and espionage challenges confronting some of the most daring and courageous Americans of the 20th century. These efforts required unprecedented feats of intellection in the face of earthshaking consequences before the phrase “earth- shaking consequences” had even been invented.
What emerges about the American effort through archival footage and dozens of interviews, but especially through Ms. Kempner’s storytelling, is an America so much more capable and together than it is today that it’s embarrassing.
I asked Ms. Kempner, whose film projects have leaned toward underappreciated Jews such as television producer Gertrude Berg and baseball Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg, what her favorite moment was from “The Spy Behind Home Plate,” and she went to where the film lives, in the minutiae of the espionage.
“I think one of the most interesting moments is about the shoes,” she said.
In one exchange, Berg is shown to have complained loudly about the shoes he had to wear behind enemy lines. They were too narrow and too small, he said. But they were handmade to mirror shoes made in Germany at the time. A spy could not so much as leave a footprint that looked like it came from a shoe made in America.
As scholars of the time point out, Hitler felt that America was weak because of its diversity, but the people at the top of the OSS knew the opposite was true. Fortunately for the fate of democracy itself, no country on earth had more people with more knowledge of other countries.
Few of those Americans in that era, especially those who pursued global knowledge so ravenously, were more fascinating than Moe Berg.