Butler's Cinema Scene

Moe Berg

“THE SPY BEHIND HOME PLATE” My rating: B

141 minutes | No MPAA rating

Morris “Moe” Berg was an unlikely professional athlete any way you look at it.

He went to Harvard (one of the few Jews admitted in the 1920s), spoke a dozen languages (apparently he self-taught himself Japanese on a boat ride across the Pacific) and was a catcher for several Major League teams.

True, Berg’s batting average was mediocre (less because of his batting than because of his glacial base running), but he was a very good defensive player and was often utilized by his managers as a bullpen catcher who nurtured, encouraged and brought out the best in young pitchers.

On top of that he was a fairly notorious ladies’ man.

All of which would have been enough for most of us.  But in the years before and during World War II Berg was a secret agent for the OSS, the precursor of the CIA.

On a goodwill trip of American All Star players to Japan he risked his neck by making home movies of ports and military installations in and around Tokyo, earning the gratitude of the U.S. intelligence community.

On another mission he dodged bullets with American troops liberating Italy so he could locate and relocate Italian scientists who had worked on German military projects.

And at the height of the conflict he was sent to a technical conference in Switzerland to observe a German scientist believed to be working on the Nazis’ atomic bomb.  Berg’s orders were to determine if the scientist was indeed involved in nuclear research and if such was the case, to assassinate the man. Had it come to that Berg undoubtedly would have been charged with murder by the Swiss authorities…providing he survived retaliation by the scientist’s bodyguards.

Aviva Kemper’s documentary follows much the same trajectory as “The Catcher Was a Spy,” the 2018  feature that starred Paul Rudd as Berg.

But it is in the little biographical details that the doc stands out: its depiction of Berg’s boyhood (he came from a family of secular Russian Jews and posed as a gentile in order to play ball on a church-sponsored team). The conflict between Berg and his father, who found athletic pursuits a waste of time (to please Papa Berg got a law degree, which he barely used).

The film features lots of vintage film and photos, but a big chunk of it is of the talking head variety, with a small army of baseball scholars, military historians and Berg family members offering their two bits on the Moe Berg saga.  Any one of them might be boringly pedantic, but Kemper employs a rapid-fire editing style so that these interviewees appear to be finishing each other’s sentences.

(“The Catcher Was a Spy” posits that Berg was, if not gay, at the very least bi-sexual.  This documentary, though, hasn’t the slightest whiff of scandal about it.  Perhaps that was the price for the cooperation of the Berg family.)

Neither film, though, is able to nail Berg’s personality.  He remains something of an enigma, an intellectual in pinstripes who real-life adventures end up not so much illuminating the man as shrouding him in perpetual mystery.

 Robert W. Butler