BEFORE: From World War I, I move on to World War II. No films about World War III currently scheduled, but that's a good thing. After tonight it's all about watching the three films that will connect me to the start of my romance chain, now re-scheduled from February 1 to February 2, to accommodate the late addition of "1917".
Mark Strong carries over from "1917" - for his 6th appearance in 2020. De Niro has 7 already, and will win the month, but Mark Strong is right behind - but it's still very early, anything can happen, and usually does.
THE PLOT: A major league baseball player, Moe Berg, lives a double life working for the Office of Strategic Services.
AFTER: This is another one of those "absurd but true" stories, like "Stockholm" was - people only found out years later that this guy who was a catcher for the Red Sox also worked for the OSS, which was the precursor to the CIA. Moe Berg was a very smart guy, he spoke seven languages fluently and was passable in a few others. He had several college degrees, which doesn't really fit the stereotype we have these days for athletes - but this was back before World War II, it was a different time, back when a college degree meant something, and colleges didn't create a bunch of "easy A" courses for athletes to take.
But being smart, athletic, fluent in several languages - he might not have been considered 1-A for the WW2 draft, but he wanted to serve his country somehow, so intelligence seemed to be that path for him, and the OSS wanted him. Plus he had footage he had filmed in Japan when he was there on an exhibition baseball trip, so I guess he was thinking ahead? The smarter people had been debating for years over whether war with Japan was inevitable.
After months doing desk work, he finally got sent into the field, to track down Werner Heisenberg in Zurich, to determine if the Nazis were close to building an atomic bomb, which was theoretical at the time. Albert Einstein and a few other scientists had already signed up with the Allies - Einstein was visiting the U.S. in 1933 when Hitler came to power, and because he was Jewish, he just didn't go back, and later became an American citizen in 1940. Einstein had warned FDR about the possibility of using nuclear fission as a weapon, so the question became how far the Nazi scientists had also come in this regard.
Heisenberg was one of the chief German scientists, and had received the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of quantum mechanics. What came to be known as the "Heisenberg uncertainty principle" stated that on the quantum level, the more precisely a particle's position could be determined, the less precisely its momentum could be predicted, and vice versa. In other words, you could either figure out where something tiny is or where it's going, but not both. (It was NOT, as some mistakenly believe, the similar principle that measuring certain systems changes the nature of what's being measured, that's called "the observer effect".) But there was a whole lot of uncertainty around Heisenberg himself, it seems, like where his loyalties were. Was he close to developing a nuclear weapon? If so, why didn't he create one, and if not, was this due to a lack of resources or information, or was he willingly preventing the creation of such a device?
So Moe Berg was sent to Italy to learn more about Heisenberg from his associate, Professor Amaldi, and his colleague in Zurich, Professor Scherrer. Heisenberg was scheduled to visit Zurich to lecture on nuclear fission, and Berg was tasked with figuring out how far Heisenberg's research had gone, and eliminating him, if necessary, to keep atomic energy out of the reach of Nazi Germany.
This is fascinating and important stuff - it's too bad nobody seemed to care about this subject matter any more, this film cost $14 million to make and didn't even break $1 million in ticket sales. Come on, people, Paul Rudd is so likable, and he's good in just about everything, what was the problem? Too brainy of a subject matter for you? Too much physics and not enough baseball? Spies aren't always of the "Mission: Impossible" type, that's not real life - real spies spend time in libraries and study other cultures and languages, and they don't just cut wires on bombs that are about to explode, they sometimes also have to learn things like physics and chemistry, so sorry to disappoint you.
I think I'm going to be kind to this one - I don't think it received anything near the level of attention that it deserved.
Also starring Paul Rudd (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Sienna Miller (last seen in "The Lost City of Z"), Jeff Daniels (last seen in "The Squid and the Whale"), Tom Wilkinson (last seen in "Smilla's Sense of Snow"), Giancarlo Giannini (last seen in "A Walk in the Clouds"), Hiroyuki Sanada (last seen in "Sunshine"), Guy Pearce (last seen in "Mary Queen of Scots"), Paul Giamatti (last seen in "San Andreas"), Connie Nielsen (last seen in "Hemingway & Gellhorn"), Shea Whigham (last seen in "Joker"), William Hope, John Schwab (last seen in "Annihilation"), Pierfrancesco Favino (last seen in "Rush"), James McVan, Jordan Long (last seen in "Holmes & Watson"), Ben Miles (last seen in "Woman in Gold"), Anna Geislerova, Agnese Nano.
RATING: 6 out of 10 quiz show appearances
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