Butler's Cinema Scene

Sarah Megan Thomas

“A CALL TO SPY” My rating: B-

123 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

An overlooked landmark in the history of World War II — not to mention in the annals of feminism — gets a  dusting off in “A Call to Spy,” the fact based story of the role women played behind enemy lines in Nazi-occupied France.

Lydia Dean Pilcher’s drama (the screenplay is by Sarah Megan Thomas, who also takes a leading role) begins many months before America was pulled into the conflict. The British are reeling and desperate for information of what’s going on in occupied Europe.

But as spymaster Maurcie Buckmaster (Linus Roache) admits to his second, Vera Atkins (Stana Katic), the English are amateurs at this stuff. Their agents are being quickly swept up and eliminated by the Gestapo.

Atkins has an idea.  The Germans are expecting male infiltrators. Why not women?

Her search quickly brings her to the U.S. Embassy and Virginia Hall (Thomas), a fiercely capable individual (despite having one prosthetic leg) whose dreams of joining America’s diplomatic corps are being crushed by nearsighted male chauvinism.

Being both fluent in French and an American (remember, the Yanks are still neutral), she will be able to move more or less unimpeded throughout Vichy.  Especially when she’s given a cover as a foreign correspondent for an American newspaper.

Another recruit is Noor Inayat Khan (Radhika Apte), a Sufi Muslim working as a radio operator under Buckmaster.  She is so fast with Morse Code that she’s sent to set up a wireless station in France through which British spies can channel their findings. Though a pacifist, Noor believes her spying can save lives.

Radhika Apte

Thomas’ screenplay looks briefly at the training of these newly-minted agents; then plops our heroines down in France where they must deal with Resistance members, collaborators, informants, counteragents and other complications.

In execution “A Call to Spy” is pretty standard stuff — well-enough made and acted, but in no way remarkable. There have been plenty of other films about women in espionage.

But the historic facts make this yarn more compelling than you’d expect.  There’s a irony in seeing these women risking particularly nasty deaths while simultaneously coping with the affronted male egoes of their fellow agents.

Particularly interesting are the closing credits, which reveal the later lives of the major players. Hall, for example, returned to the U.S. and became the CIA’s first female field agent.

| Robert W. Butler