A Compassionate Spy: In Praise of Treason

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B+

Oh, to be a young genius, in love, and convinced you are saving the humanity from nuclear Armageddon.

That’s the compelling hook of the documentary A Compassionate Spy from Steve James, which tells the story of Ted Hall, the youngest member of the Manhattan Project team at Los Alamos. While the others celebrated following the first nuclear test on the morning of July 16, 1945, the 18-year-old Harvard grad returned to his room, feeling miserable.

Convinced that a world where the United States had a monopoly on nuclear weapons was not a safe one, he decided to give away secrets that helped the Soviets develop their own bomb.

A Compassionate Spy, which debuted out of competition at Venice last year, pairs well with Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Both films deal with scientists, one famous and one a novice, who worked on the development of the atomic bomb, and were embroiled in the paranoid politics of the Cold War.

In contrast to the complex psychodrama of Nolan’s opus, A Compassionate Spy is a gentle and intimate film, largely narrated by Hall’s wife, Joan, who was 90 at the time of filming. She tells a love story.

Joan and Ted met in college and wed in 1947, after he divulged what he had done. She helped him keep his secret for most of the next half-century. Exposure would have meant at least a prison term, like other atomic spies Klaus Fuchs or David Greenglass who worked on the Manhattan Project. Or, like Greenglass’s sister and brother-in-law, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, he could be executed for sabotage.

Ted came close to confessing his part in helping the Soviets, in the hopes of saving the Rosenberg’s lives but Joan dissuaded him. The couple drove past Sing Sing prison the evening the Rosenbergs were electrocuted.

Shortly before his death in 1999, Ted went on the CNN series, The Cold War. He speaks about it more candidly in a private video, where he looks frail and soft-spoken. “It would be nice to be proud,” he says, “but I’m not a proud person.”

The Halls’ story is also about Ted’s accomplice and close friend, the poet Saville Sax, who Joan also knew and loved. As well as interviews with both of Joan and Ted’s daughters, the film includes interviews with Sax’s adult children.

Hall and Sax were both suspected and interrogated, but with Joan’s coaching, Ted refused to be intimidated. Eventually, the couple fled the U.S. to Cambridge, England, where she taught, he continued to work as a research scientist, and they raised their family.

Joan, who died last month, is a perceptive and moving narrator and one could easily see the film getting a feature romantic-thriller feature treatment. James goes partly that direction through selective dramatizations, with mixed results.

As well as his estimable documentaries — Hoop Dreams (1994), Stevie (2002), The Interrupters (2011), Life Itself (2014), and the Oscar-nominated Abacus: Small Enough To Jail (2016), the director has dabbled in fictional features (Prefontaine, Joe and Max). The re-acted sequences, desaturated for a mid-century look, are better than TV news reenactments, but feel stilted and distracting.

Arguably, James could have gone further in questioning Hall’s idealism, and his conviction that a balance of terror made for a safer world than letting the United States hold all the power. Only Boria Sax, the academic son of Hall’s accomplice, questions the wisdom of giving the deadliest weapon in history to Josef Stalin’s brutal regime.

For context, the film establishes that socialist and pro-Soviet sentiments were far from uncommon in the war years, when both countries were allied against Hitler.

There’s a revealing clip from the Hollywood propaganda film Mission to Moscow, commissioned by President Franklin D. Rosevelt, which painted Stalin in a highly favourable light. The director was Michael Curtiz, and the film was released just months after his better-known propaganda romance, Casablanca.

A Compassionate Spy. Directed by Steve James. With Joan Hall, Ted Hall, and Joseph Albright. In theatres August 4.