Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, due in July, is sure to fit its eponymous physicist out with dutiful misgivings on the atomic weaponry front. But this engrossing documentary by Hoop Dreams’ Steve James tells the story of someone who actually did something about it: Ted Hall, who confessed in 1998 – a year before his death – to having passed nuclear secrets to the Soviets while working on the Manhattan project. Recruited as an 18-year-old Harvard genius, he came to feel that a US monopoly on the bomb would threaten global stability and the future of humanity.
A sensitive college boy and nascent communist who chafed against wearing military uniform at Los Alamos, Hall gave priceless schematics to Uncle Joe via his beatnik friend, the excellently named Saville Sax, who was the one who actually stepped inside the Soviet consulate. James gets inside the fulminating, jingoistic wartime US ambience through dramatic recreations of college trysts and FBI shakedowns, as well as Hall’s final interviews – notably the CNN spot in which he eventually came clean. But it’s anchoring this all in testimony from Hall’s now elderly wife, Joan, that gives A Compassionate Spy a passionate payload, making it as much a love story as a political chronicle. “A nonconformist, keeping clear of everyone else’s nonconformity,” is how she sums him up. “Did I forget to say he was beautiful?”
