Film Review: A Call To Spy

A Call to Spy

The Lady Spies of World War II

I’ve always said if you want to get something done, call a woman. Winston Churchill decided to try that after France fell to Nazi domination in 1941, and England was left alone to defend the English Channel and England itself. 

He started a new agency called Special Operations Executive (SOE), which would recruit and train pretty women as spies. Their jobs: sabotage, subversion and recruitment of Resistance fighters.

 

Actress Sarah Megan Thomas wrote and co-stars, and Lydia Dean Pilcher directs “A Call to Spy,” which concentrates on the fictionalized stories of three of the women who answered the call, even after being told they had only a 50% chance of survival.

Thomas plays American Virginia Hall, who applied to be a British diplomat but was turned down because she had a wooden leg from a hunting accident. Virginia is the most daring, willing to try most anything and determined to do anything necessary to further the cause of the Resistance.

Noor Inayat Khan (Radhika Apte), born in Russia to an American mother and Indian father, is a gentle soul and a Sufi Muslim – a sect that she describes as “lovers of peace and truth.” 

Romanian Vera Atkins (Stana Katic is picked by section head Maurice Buckmaster (Linus Roache) to lead the group. She has her own problems: she’s not yet a British citizen, is mourning a lover reported “missing in action,” and must be careful to conceal her Jewish heritage. 

“A Call to Spy” has a properly dark and foreboding look. Most of it was filmed in and around Philadelphia – including the the home of the family that inspired “The Philadelphia Story,” used for the “stately home” where the spies were trained. Some of the scenes in 1940’s France were shot in Budapest. The whole was beautifully shot by cinematographers Robby Baumgartner (Philadelphia) and Miles Goodall (Budapest). 

Bravos also go to production designer Kim Jennings, costume designer Vanessa Porter and composer Lillie Rebecca McDonough.

“A Call to Spy” is a tense and disturbing film, wonderfully shot and acted. Though fictionalized, the three women were real spies, which leaves viewers to ponder what they would do in like circumstances.

"A Call to Spy" opens in select markets on October 2.

Film Review: All In: The Fight for Democracy

 Why does America make voting so difficult?

They called it a democracy, but the Founding Fathers of the new U.S. decided to limit the most basic democratic right of all – voting – to men. And not all men, but men who owned property. They numbered about 6% of the population.

It took 133 years of meetings, marches, planning and political action to achieve (at least on paper) universal suffrage – even for women and freed slaves. But that was followed by further actions to limit the right to vote. Chief among these was voter suppression.

In Amazon Studios’ “All In: The Fight for Democracy,” main commentator Stacey Abrams, the Democrat who ran against Brian Kemp for Governor of Georgia in 2018, maintains that voter suppression had a large impact on the close vote that gave Kemp the victory. As Secretary of State, Kemp was in charge of the vote, which was marred by broken machines, long lines and inaccurate voting rolls.

“All In” filmmakers Directors Liz Garbus and Lisa Cortes tell – and show – the long and often sad story of the slow march to suffrage in a film that has never been more relevant than it is right now, as Americans prepare to vote once again. The message here: VOTE! 

The Supreme Court in 2013 struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That provision required that changes in state voting laws pass federal scrutiny. This made voter suppression easier. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion. In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that “throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

What followed was a series of state laws requiring things like a certain kind of ID card, or payment of a poll tax, or that ex-felons pay all the fees they owe before being allowed to vote – none of which have anything to do with fitness to vote, but all of which effectively limit voting. 

Each step forward in voting seems to be followed by a counterreaction to limit it. 

Why does America make voting so difficult? “All In: The Fight for Democracy” will give you a few answers. All Americans should see it. And then VOTE!

Theater Review: The Niceties

 Of race and privilege

What starts as a simple student-teacher conference turns into a fascinating if prickly argument about white privilege, race, power and (to quote “Hamilton”) who gets to tell your story in playwright Eleanor Burgess’ riveting two-hander “The Niceties,” playing through Oct. 24 in Zoom format from Moxie Theatre.

Zoe (Deja Fields), a black college sophomore at an elite East Coast university, visits U.S. history prof Janine (Mouchette van Heisdingen) to discuss Zoe’s paper on the American Revolution. 

Zoe is young, smart, and needs an “A” on this paper (she’s gunning for Phi Beta Kappa). More than a student, she’s also a political activist, and is checking in with Janine early to make sure she has time to make any changes the prof may request.

Janine is white and middle-aged, a play-by-the-rules professor of some renown whose latest book is about to be published.

Simple grammar goofs and source citation issues give way to Janine’s real problem with the paper: Zoe’s failure to adequately document her non-mainstream contention that slavery is the reason the U.S. revolution never turned into a violent struggle the way the major European revolutions did.

This makes for an increasingly blistering but utterly engaging back-and-forth about facts, scholarship and sources that may well have your head spinning and your opinions switching back and forth more than once.

Deja Fields is perfectly cast as the ambitious young activist who knows how to stand her ground, even if it does get under her prof’s skin.

Mouchette Van Heisdingen’s Janine has lived by the book and by “accepted scholarship” all her professional life – which has given her the clout she has – but she isn’t quite sure what to make of this young upstart with different notions and convictions.

The play was written before the 2016 elections but it’s still timely, even with this comment: “We’re about to elect our first female president!”

“The Niceties” is an auspicious beginning to Moxie’s 16th season, which they’ve adapted admirably to COVID necessities by filming the play in the theater for Zoom presentation. The play calls out for discussion, and Moxie allows for that at the end, and a short documentary about the filming process will be shown.

Bravo to director Delicia Turner Sonnenberg and the artistic team, whose jobs were made much more difficult by the COVID restrictions.

Moxie has been one of my favorite scrappy little companies since the beginning. “The Niceties” shows several of their strongest points: good play choices, fine casting and adaptability. 

The details

Moxie Theatre’s production of Eleanor Burgess’ “The Niceties” plays on Zoom through October 24, 2020. Showtimes: Thursday through Saturday at 7 p.m. ; matinees Sept. 21-24 and Sundays at 2 p.m.

Tickets: (858) 598-7620 or moxietheatre.com/playing-now/the-niceties

Film Review: "Gather"

 

“The red nation shall rise again and it shall be a blessing for a sick world, a world filled with broken promises, selfishness and separations, a world longing for light again.”

--- Crazy Horse, Oglala Lakota Nation

The American colonists may have fled Mother England in search of freedom, but they wasted no time denying freedom to others – first, to the natives they found here, and later to imported persons (mostly Africans) dragged here in chains as slaves.

In the short documentary “Gather,” Director Sanjay Rawal relates the sorry history of murder (many colonists shot indigenous people on sight), starvation (some 60 million buffalo were slaughtered to starve the Lakota nation in South Dakota into submission), and forced assimilation, an attempt to deny their cultural identity.

But the majority of “Gather” is more positive, documenting a growing movement among contemporary indigenous Americans to reclaim the territory and cultural identity the colonists tried to eliminate.

The film shows a meeting of those who return to tribal lands to meet and organize. For many, it is their first visit in years. For some, like Lakota high schooler Elsie DuBray, it’s a revelation. 

“It’s just so cool when I walk out and see the animals,” she reports. “They look like they belong here.” DuBray will become a scientist, studying biochemistry – and minoring in Native Studies – at Stanford. 

Food takes center stage, as we watch a new indigenous restaurant – Café Gozhóó – being installed in a deserted gas station.  The proprietor will be Chef Nephi Craig. His culinary training is classical French, but now he has returned to his roots. It is, as one elder puts it, “reintroducing young people to our traditions, land and ways of healing.”

A group of young Yurok tribesmen of Northern California are struggling to save their livelihood, which depends on fish from the Klamath River and has been threatened by the removal of a dam.

There is much work to do. But these folks seem ready, even excited about the struggle, and Rawal leaves us with hope for a good resolution. As one puts it, “The Industrial Revolution is over. Now to survive, we need to be part of the Restorative Revolution.”

Recommended audience: All Americans

"Gather" is available Sep. 8 on iTunes and Amazon

Genre: Documentary

MPAA Rating: Not rated

Studio: Illumine Group

Runtime: 74 minutes

Directed by: Sanjay Rawal