Nosh 117: 'Three Identical Strangers,' 'The Catcher Was a Spy'

By David Elliott

    

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER: Reviews of Three Identical Strangers and The Catcher Was a Spy

Three Identical Strangers

Never to be confused with 1946’s bizarre Three Strangers – those being Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet and Geraldine Fitzgerald – Three Identical Strangers is even more bizarre. Tim Wardle’s documentary is about identical triplets Bobby Shafran, Eddy Galland and David Kellman, separated after 1961 birth (their mom was single and, they later discovered, an alcoholic depressive). Adopted by three families living not very far apart, none knew the deep truth about their situation, stemming from a prestigious  agency known for placing Jewish children. In 1980 the boys were suddenly united by the finger of fate and crazy luck.

What a reunion! Here they are in clips and photos, with beaming smiles and curly hair, looking like jolly genetic clones. Tom Brokaw, Jane Pauley and Phil Donahue fomented media interest, and they opened a Manhattan restaurant (Triplets, of course). But, as a female adoptee admits, reality was “a little darker than a Disney movie.” There was a top-level New York psychiatrist, who survived the Holocaust only to conduct a very secret study of separated identicals, including David, Bobby and Eddy. Among the many talking heads is the Great Doctor’s retired secretary, a chirpy old bird retired in plush La Jolla, preening about her celebrity connections. We hear of the “powerful” Jewish social agency, so caring, but not caring to talk about the study it funded, now locked away at Yale. You might start to wonder if the tangled trail leads back to Dr. Mengele and The Boys From Brazil.

The boys became middle-aged men, sadly weary of loss and injustice. Each married, but on film the bro-bond remains omnipresent. Although the big welfare agency is Jewish, as are the families, we never hear a rabbi or find if religion impacted the brothers beyond broken wedding glass. The separated kids banged their wee, lonely heads on walls and cribs, and were raised by very different parents, but such things are more stated than explored.

Guiding the central, Nature vs. Nurture issue is thoughtful reporter Lawrence Wright (who wrote the 9-11 book The Looming Tower). The film, wandering through many shadows, is one of the strange documentaries (like Marwencol, The Quiet One, Capturing the Friedmans and Life, Animated) about the obscure mysteries of self, family and fate. It seems likely that the hidden study, a product of the Freud and Kinsey era, will finally shed less light than Greek tragedy, the Torah and Dr. Spock.      

The Catcher Was a Spy

There seems to be a law that every vivid episode of World War II must become a movie. So now we find that Morris “Moe” Berg, highly regarded 1930s catcher for the Boston Red Sox, was: 1. a polymath with major degrees and fluent in many languages, 2. less a Jew than “Jew-ish” (his words), 3. secretly homosexual, 4. a superb chess player, and 5. an American spy sent to contact and perhaps kill Werner Heisenberg. The scientist was the most important German physicist who didn’t flee Hitler’s rule, and led (possibly delayed, perhaps hobbled) the Nazi effort to build an atomic bomb. Fans, you won’t find all that on a baseball card.

The Catcher Was a Spy starts with a rather dousing fact. Berg (Paul Rudd) is inserted into neutral Switzerland to corner the visiting Heisenberg in late 1944. By then the Reich barely had a viable air force, and never could have afforded a Manhattan Project like America’s, not even a measly Staten Island Project (Hitler called atomic energy “Jewish science”). Ben Lewin’s film relies on teasing out Berg’s personal secrets, then using them as the subtextual template for his daring mission. There is a lot of sobering conversation, a little straight sex, a shy scene of crypto-gay suggestion in Japan (with suave Hiroyuki Sanada of Twilight Samurai), some rugged combat in Italy and nicked-in performances by Paul Giamatti, Sienna Miller, Guy Pearce, Jeff Daniels, Giancarlo Giannini and (as Heisenberg) Mark Strong.

Rudd is effectively subtle, yet the spy thrills feel rather pasted and patented. The Swiss showdown, mostly talk and fog, is less a climax than a murky tangent of Heisenberg’s famous “uncertainty principle” in quantum physics. The story’s nerve-plucking falls well short of old pictures like Man Hunt, Five Fingers and Eye of the Needle. Moe’s movie is a small chip in the vast WWII mosaic. If you want a brainy Jewish sports hero with charisma, the film to see is still The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg.
 

SALAD: A List

Highly Enjoyable World War II Spy Movies

The finest, Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) with Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant, is technically a postwar drama, ditto Welles’s The Stranger. With star and year:

Contraband (Conrad Veidt, 1940), Foreign Correspondent (Joel McCrea, 1940), Man Hunt (Walter Pidgeon, 1941), All Through the Night (Humphrey Bogart, 1942), Nazi Agent (Conrad Veidt, 1942), Journey Into Fear (Joseph Cotten, 1943), Decision Before Dawn (Oskar Werner, 1951), Five Fingers (James Mason, 1952), The Man Who Never Was (Clifton Webb, 1956), The Counterfeit Traitor (William Holden, 1965), Morituri (Marlon Brando, 1965), The Eagle Has Landed (Michael Caine, 1976), Eye of the Needle (Donald Sutherland, 1981), Black Book (Clarice van Houten, 2006), Lust, Caution (Tang Wei, 2007).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson Welles’s cultural hero was Shakespeare, his most reliable creative yeast from late boyhood, and James Naremore discerns a psychological root: “All his major characters (on film, like) Kane, George Minafer, Captain Quinlan, are imprisoned by their past, destroyed not only by the aging process and the inexorable march of ‘progress,’ but by the sheer difficulty of becoming adult in a new world. And given his obsession with this kind of story, it is only natural that Welles should have had a lifelong preoccupation with Shakespeare’s history plays, which treat the same intersection of public and private problems.” (One should add that Welles had a short childhood and carried on like a king. Quote from Naremore’s The Magic World of Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Based on B. Traven’s hardboiled novel, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre had to run the censorship gauntlet in 1948 Hollywood: “Censors sliced away racial references, Dobbs’s mention of sex, his sneer about Curtin’s ‘Bolshevik ideas,’ a line about Mexican oil expropriation, a faked decapitation. ‘What’s wrong,’ Bogart cracked off-screen, ‘with showing a guy having his head cut off?’ Despite the film’s doubled cost, Jack L. Warner called it his studio’s best.” (Still, it was something of a tough sell. Quotation from the Bogart/Treasure chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available via Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Maurer (Oskar Werner) and Hilde (Hildegarde Knef) have a tense exchange in Decision Before Dawn (20^th Century Fox, 1951; director Anatole Litvak, cinematographer Franz Planer).

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