NEW YORK _ Whether or not Moe Berg was the "strangest man ever to play baseball," as Casey Stengel reportedly once called him, he might have been the most interesting one.
But that reputation was forged off the field, not on it, where he spent 15 big league seasons in the 1920s and '30s as a backup catcher with a good glove and a .243 career batting average. He hit six home runs in 1,813 at-bats.
Berg is better known today as a mysterious, brainy bookworm who spoke multiple languages and turned that and a love of travel into a role as a spy for the United States before and during World War II, in both Asia and Europe.
His life reads like fiction, but it happened, and was chronicled in a 1994 book by Nicholas Dawidoff, "The Catcher was a Spy," that last year became a movie starring Paul Rudd as Berg.
Now Moe is back, in the form of the first feature-length documentary about him, "The Spy Behind Home Plate," by director Aviva Kempner.
It opens in New York and on Long Island this weekend, with Kempner set to appear at a 7 p.m. Saturday (June 1) screening at the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington. It opens at Malverne Cinema and Manhasset Cinemas on June 7.
Kempner was born in post-war Berlin to a mother who was a Holocaust survivor. Her father was a U.S. Army officer and a big Hank Greenberg fan, which inspired her love of baseball and a 1998 documentary on the Tigers great of the 1930s and '40s.
When one of her funders, Bill Levine, suggested she consider films about two other 20th century Jewish sports stars, Sid Luckman and Barney Ross, she told him she does not like football or boxing.
He then moved on to Berg, Kempner agreed, and Levine funded the project, which took 3 { years.
"It fits into my films about non-stereotyped Jews who are underknown heroes fighting 'isms,'" she said. "For this we have Fascism. And it was someone who was a baseball player who is a Jewish man who has both brawn and brains, and there are not a lot of role models for that.
"More importantly, we would not all be here if he had not helped unravel the secret of whether the Nazis had nuclear capability."
(The film's climax is an encounter between Berg and the German physicist Werner Heisenberg in Zurich in 1944.)
Among Kempner's other films is one on television pioneer Gertrude Berg of the early sitcom "The Goldbergs."
"I'm very into 'Bergs,' " she joked.
She also said, "Sometimes they call me the 'Jewish Spike Lee.' "
Kempner had read Dawidoff's book and was intrigued. She built on that with new interviews and archival footage of Berg, which was limited by his marginal status as a baseball player and by his secret, post-baseball role.
There are brief audio snippets of him appearing on a 1930s radio quiz show _ and acing it, of course.
"I assure you if there was more, we would have used it," Kempner said. "I certainly don't have any audio of him being a spy."
Many of the principals died long before Kempner took on the project, so essential to it are 18 interviews conducted between 1987 and '91 for a film called "The Best Gloveman in the League" that never was completed.
They include Berg's brother, Sam, who died in 1990. (Moe died in 1972 at age 70.)
"That's what really makes the movie, I think," Kempner said of the interviews of Berg's contemporaries. They have been digitized and are archived at Princeton, Berg's alma mater.
"Now people can see all the interviews," Kempner said. "It's great for history, it's great for the story and it's great for me, because it makes the film much richer and exclusive."
Kempner, three of whose grandparents were murdered by the Nazis, said one of her inspirations as a filmmaker is "trying to right the wrongs of what happened in my family and put out positive images (of Jews)."
In Berg's case, that involved merely helping to save the world.
