A broken heart in a changing city

Race and gentrification provide the background for The Last Black Man in San Francisco, a sweet and mournful story of loss.

Sometimes, dreams are rooted in a place —- a city, for example. Maybe even a neighborhood.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco deals with many issues, principal among them: race, gentrification and the ruthless onslaught of commercial imperatives. The movie tells a story of lost dreams by focusing on what once was an all-American symbol of stability, a house.

We'd like to think that houses once were repositories of family histories that would be passed from generation to generation. Grandpa's house always would be grandpa's house, if only in our imaginations.

In Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, an African-American family's triumph involved buying a house that became a brick-and-mortar symbol of upward mobility and arrival, as well as of persistence and of sustained hope. Even if we never had seen that house, we understood its power.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco also preoccupies itself with a house -- albeit in unexpected and revealing ways. A young man and his best friend occupy a house in a once-black neighborhood that's undergoing displacement prompted by gentrification. The young man believes that his grandfather built the house in the 1940s, following the style of the grand Victorian homes of 18th century San Francisco.

Even before occupying the house, Jimmie Fails -- played by Jimmie Fails (more about that in a minute) -- and his pal Montgomery (Jonathan Majors) had been trying to spiff up the house. They've painted its trim and wondered how to salvage a garden that has gone to ruin.

The current white residents of the house aren’t happy to find the young men at work but express a reluctant tolerance about their efforts.

When those residents lose the house, the fierce winds of the real estate market gather force and we know that this project — a reclamation not only of a house but of a past —- will come to naught.

We bring a bit of real-world knowledge to the movie. When it comes to real estate, market forces can be impossible to resist. If necessary, the past will be bulldozed. We know that all too well.

Director Joe Talbot, a childhood friend of Fails, tells a story that we're tempted to see as at least autobiographical in spirit because Fails uses his real name.

The movie's events may not be literarily true but they have the ring of metaphoric truth concerning the fragmentation of family in an increasingly uprooted society.

Approaching almost everything with deadpan sincerity, Fails and Montgomery reminded me of a couple of characters from a Samuel Beckett play; they're made of flesh and blood but also, slightly abstracted.

A quasi-theatrical atmosphere is enhanced by a group of neighborhood street people that serves as a Greek chorus for the story. Fails and Montgomery interact with them —- neither entirely separated from them nor entirely part of the group, either.

Most of the movie involves the efforts of the two young men to establish a home in a property they don’t own —- at least not in the conventional sense. But as the story progresses, you may find yourself thinking about issues of ownership and territory. Could there be another meaning of ownership at work here?

Talbot populates the movie with San Francisco characters and eccentricities. Danny Glover appears as Montgomery's blind grandfather; Rob Morgan plays Jimmie's embittered father; and Tichina Arnold portrays his aunt. Though sometimes tenuous, these family connections aren't lost. Jimmie grew up in various squats and in group homes.

And, then, there's the naked man at a bus stop, but I leave that for you to discover.

Emile Mosseri's musical score perfectly fits a movie that’s poetic, mournful, scrappy and sweet.

Talbot has trouble bringing the movie to a close and some of his images don't qualify as perfect blends of the real and the metaphoric. But the feeling here is one of love: for a city, for a longed-for connection with the past, and for a sense of place. There's also the love of two friends for each other.

I want to say (and please don’t take this in a negative way) that Last Black Man made me feel as if I’d attended a memorial service that mixed both grief and a sense of release, of letting go.

Late in the movie, Jimmie listens to two young white women talk on a bus. He tells them that they have to right to hate the city unless they love it. The right to hatred must be earned. Hate upscale obliterations that have ravaged neighborhoods. Hate the stress and tensions of constant economic struggle. Hate the pollution that's choking the life out of what's left of nature.

But love the memory, even if it's romanticized, of what once was. And perhaps equally important, mourn the loss of what could have been.

The Shaft family adds another generation

The new version of Shaft can be funny and brash, but it's also scattered and its unashamed political incorrectness can be grating.

One of them is hopelessly old school. That means he’s homophobic and misogynistic. He has built a reputation on the streets with his fists, his guns and a take-no-prisoners attitude.

The other is a millennial, an MIT graduate who works in data analysis at the FBI. He’s brainy and culturally adept, comfortable with the social fluidity of a multicultural world.

The gimmick: Both are named Shaft. They're father and son.

John Shaft, you’ll recall is the iconic black detective who emerged in the 1970s as part of the Blaxploitation wave that kept turnstiles spinning. In director Tim Story's new version of Shaft, the youngest Shaft (Jessie Usher) hasn't seen his rogue father in years.

The twist: The son must turn to his street-wise dad for help in discovering who murdered his best friend, a Muslim veteran (Avan Jogia) who seemed to be getting his life together after going through a difficult time with drugs.

I’m not sure what Story had in mind with this new version of Shaft, which checks so many boxes you might call it with a multiple choice movie. It’s a buddy comedy (albeit between father and son), an action thriller with a plot that’s so disposable you don’t really need to follow it, a generational comedy in which a son continually taps the breaks on his father’s out-dated, politically incorrect views on women and gays, as well as a movie that features high-caliber weapons taking out what can seem like hordes of bad guys.

Samuel L. Jackson portrays Shaft, as he did in director John Singleton’s 2004 entry into the Shaft series. The role, of course, dates back to the 1971 original and a variety of sequels starring Richard Roundtree, who makes a movie-stealing appearance late in this edition.

To reiterate: Jackson's Shaft is the son of Roundtree's Shaft and the father of Usher's Shaft. Got it?

Here’s something to consider. Jackson is 70. Roundtree is 76. The movie tells us Jackson’s Shaft is 60. Even at that, the math doesn’t quite work. Oh well, looking for realism in this version of Shaft is about as useful as thinking you’re going to get through the movie without a substantial quotient of MF expletives. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you have no business seeing the movie anyway.

Jackson has played variations of this character before; his performance not only reprises his previous work as Shaft but includes echoes of Jules, the hitman he played in Pulp Fiction.

All of this results in a hit-and-miss affair, a movie that's probably best seen with a large audience that’s willing to get raucous — roughly in the way the ‘70s movies were received.

Story tries to evoke ‘70s nostalgia with Shaft’s throwback attitudes, with a score that makes ample use of the Isaac Hayes' theme from the original and with an immersion in the mean streets of Harlem -- not to mention the suede dusters you see all three characters wearing in the movie's sequel-promising final shot.

Usher makes a fine foil for Jackson, slowly emerging as something less than the guy his father accuses him of being. Jokes about whether Usher's JJ can be called a "real" man embody the movie’s conflicted spirit. Yes, some of these jokes can be taken as insulting and even homophobic. I guess they're supposed to explain how an out-of-touch father tries to taunt a son who grew up with his mother and who's fluent in the language of the 21st century.

So can these two men find a single page on which both can thrive — and, oh yeah, solve the mystery at the movie’s core?

You already know the answer. Turns out that Shaft the Younger is skilled with guns and well-trained in a Brazilian form of martial arts and both men are capable of laying out their enemies without feeling an iota of compunction about taking human lives.

Women in Shaft basically serve the plot. Mom (Regina Hall) isn’t around for much of the movie; young shaft’s love interest (Alexandra Shipp) has a bit more to do. But when they do appear, these women have no trouble establishing their presence, claiming equal footing with the male characters.

Did I laugh at some of the comedy? Yes. Did I find the violence excessive and not stylish enough to turn into something that could be appreciated purely on cinematic terms, as we might in a John Wick movie? Yes to that, as well. Were the jokes about gays a bit repetitive? Yes, again. Did the movie get better when Roundtree finally makes his appearance? Another yes. Was there at least one piece of action that caught me by surprise. Well, there would have been had I not already seen it in the movie's trailer.

So where do I stand on Shaft?

The whole movie may be too preposterous to take offense; remember Story also directed two Ride Along movies. But know this as well, there’s no character here who’s likely to attain the iconic status of the original Shaft. That movie was tightly wedded to its time. This one is less of its time than it is a spawn of dozens of other movies. As I said at the outset, a box checker.

How much you enjoy it depends on how many of those boxes you're able to check.

Jim Jarmusch makes his zombie movie

Every now and again, I come across a movie that I watch without being able to form much of a connection. That certainly was the case with The Dead Don't Die, director Jim Jarmusch's belated entry into the world of zombie movies. Employing a cast led by Bill Murray, Adam Driver, and Chloe Sevigny -- all of whom play small-town cops — Jarmusch deadpans his way through a dreary foray to a small town where the dead are popping up from their graves. There's little point making this kind of movie without taking aim at a decaying world. To that end, Steve Buscemi portrays a racist farmer who wears a "Keep America White Again" hat, a take on ... well ... you know. Strange things begin to happen in the tiny fictional town of Centerville and it doesn't take long for the dead to begin chewing on the living. Murray and Driver display little emotion as the movie progresses. Tilda Swinton adds to the weirdness quotient. She shows up as the town's mortician, a woman who also happens to wield a mean samurai sword. At one point, Jarmusch shatters convention. Driver's Ronnie justifies his gloomy outlook by telling Murray's character that he knows things will end badly because he’s read the script. Jim, he says, showed it to him. Oh, I forgot to mention that Tom Waits portrays a hermit who wanders through the woods outside of town and that Danny Glover appears as the owner of the town's hardware store. The idea of riffing on zombie movies, a deadened American culture, global warming, and small-town insularity isn't exactly new. Because The Dead Don't Die was selected as the opening offering of the Cannes Film Festival, I expected a more robust movie -- even if that movie kept faith with Jarmusch's low-key style. The Dead May Not Die, but this movie sometimes feels as if it's in need of life support. Oh well, maybe it’s me. I’ve admired some of Jarmusch’s movies and been unimpressed by others. For me, this one staggered its way onto the negative side of the ledger.

More from the Cinema Diary -- Leaving Home, Coming Home: A Portrait of Robert Frank

Leaving Home, Coming Home: A Portrait of Robert Frank

The photographer and documentary filmmaker Robert Frank, now 93, occasionally makes for good company in the documentary Leaving home, Coming Home: A Portrait of Robert Frank. I say "occasionally" because Frank can be cranky and also brutally honest. He doesn't sugarcoat, describing old age as a catastrophe of bodily degeneration. He's not a guy to look to if you're seeking consolation. Frank's career blossomed when he published a book of photographs called The Americans. Frank had traveled across the U.S., getting to know his adopted country. (He was born in Zurich.) He had an eye for desolation. That may be why Frank's collection of 83 photographs wasn't well-received by those critics who found his images overly harsh. Drawn to scenes of disconnection and loneliness, Frank also allied himself with the Beat movement. Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were friends. He lived in New York City, married had children (a son and daughter preceded him in death) and spent much of his life looking at the world through a lens. Fox makes good use of some of Frank's photos and clips from a variety of his documentaries, most of them personal and disinterested in anything that might be deemed "slick" or "formalistic." We also meet Frank's second wife, Jean Leaf, herself a painter and sculptor. The film captures Frank's artistry and also makes clear the pain of a life devoted to seeing clearly. Directed by Gerald Fox, Leaving Home first appeared in 2004 on The South Bank Show, a British TV program.

Intermittent amusement in ‘Late Night’

Mindy Kaling and Emma Thompson team in a comedy about women in the world of late-night network TV.

In the new comedy Late Night, Emma Thompson portrays Katherine Newbury, the only woman host of a long-running late-night show that airs on network TV. Icy of temperament and cruel to her staff, Katherine is supposed to be a stand-up comic with a cutting delivery. Jokes aside, she tends to prefer serious guests to refugees from reality TV.

Katherine presides over a stable of male writers whom she believes may be letting her down. Her once-popular show is on its way to becoming an afterthought. The station's new head (Amy Ryan) already has made arrangements to replace Katherine with a comic (Ike Barinholtz) who happily wallows in the sort of crude material Katherine abhors.

What to do? The screenplay by Mindy Kaling (of TV's The Office and The Mindy Project) brings fresh blood to the rescue. Kaling portrays Molly Patel, a woman who works in a chemical plant but secretly dreams of becoming a comedy writer.

As part of a desperate attempt to diversify her staff, Katherine insists on hiring a female. Molly fills the bill and, even better, qualifies as a low-expectation hire. Molly's male counterparts believe the inexperienced wannabe will vanish quickly.

Of course, Molly won't be so easily dispatched. Turns out she has fresh ideas and isn't afraid to talk about them at writers' meetings over which Katherine presides without calling any of the contributors by name. She assigns them numbers.

Two strains of assertion drive the story. Can the old dog (Katherine) learn a few new tricks and can the newbie (Molly) become a legitimate presence in helping to engineer the transformation?

Underlying both of these questions is another imperative, the one that says, it's best to be yourself and allow the chips to fall where they may.

Katherine, who's supposed to be too smart for an era of dumbed-down TV, also qualifies as too unpleasant to win many off-camera fans. Her devoted and nearly invisible husband (John Lithgow) remains a loyal supporter. Thompson's performance doesn’t skimp on scorn for Katherine’s supposed inferiors while also suggesting that she knows her fastball has lost some of its zing.

Both likable and amusing, Kaling gives a performance that helps soften Katherine's sharp edges.

Among the writers, Reid Scott (Veep), Max Casella (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) and Hugh Dancy (of TV's Hannibal) make some impact. Dennis O'Hare portrays the show's besieged producer, a fellow with the unenviable job of soothing Katherine's ego and keeping the staff from withering under the glare of her imperious gaze.

All of this might have worked well enough save for a couple of problems -- not the least of which is that Thompson, a brilliant comic actress, never seems like someone who'd find her place on a stand-up stage. It's a crucial distinction: Comic acting and stand-up don't draw on the same skills.

Laughs are a matter of taste, I suppose. For me, Late Night provided intermittent amusement until it reaches its predictably affirming conclusion. So, another movie in which promise exceeds fulfillment? For me, yes.

Bob's Cinema Diary: 6/12/19 -- Amerian Woman and Halston

American Woman

Grating in the early going, Sienna Miller's performance as an abrasive single mom and grandmother trying to scrape by in a small Pennsylvania town eventually finds its rhythm. American Woman provides Miller with an opportunity to play a woman who faces a cascading series of problems. When we meet Miller's Deb Callahan, she's having an affair with a married man (Kentucker Audley and trying to be a mother to her daughter (Sky Ferreira), a 17-year-old who already has a child of her own. Constantly at odds with her family (an older sister played by Christina Hendricks and a disapproving mother Amy Madigan), Deb faces a life-changing tragedy. Her daughter vanishes. Fearing the worst, Deb blames Tyler (Alex Neustaedter), the irresponsible teen father of her daughter's child. The movie then leaps ahead -- eventually by at least a decade -- to find Deb trying to take care of her grandson (her daughter remains missing) and living with an abusive lout (Pat Healy) she must get out of her life. Deb eventually takes up with a younger man (Aaron Paul) who seems really to love her and who makes a fine surrogate father for her now-teenaged grandson. Director Jake Scott gives the cast plenty to work with, as the movie moves toward its inevitable conclusion: Deb's emergence as an independent woman. Miller's roller-coaster performance hits strong notes. Hendricks does well as a loving but sensible sister who's married to a man (Will Sasso) who provides the one thing that Deb's life always seems to lack: continuity. Nicely rendered moments of reconciliation have an impact, but overall American Woman suffers from an overload of woe. Moreover, its title suggests ambitions that never are quite fulfilled.

Halston

Director Frédéric Tcheng's documentary follows the career of a fabled fashion designer whose work dominated nearly three decades: from hot pants to evening dresses sculpted from a single piece of fabric. Halston benefits from the arc of the designer's high-profile life. Born Roy Halston Frowick, Halston turned himself into a single-named icon who made a remarkable ascent. He began as a hat designer at prestigious Bergdorf Goodman and eventually created a brand of his own. Making use of interviews and footage from the glam world Halston inhabited, Tcheng brings us into Halston's orbit, which includes models and celebrities such as Liza Minnelli. Every story of a remarkable ascendance needs a steep decline. Halston has a doozy. Late in his career, the designer decided to enter the world of mass-marketing, partnering with J.C. Penny to open the doors of fashion to ordinary women. Feeling abandoned, Halston's high-end followers began to desert him. A variety of corporate maneuvers followed and Halston's empire eventually crumbled. When he died of AIDS in 1990, he was 57. In the whirl of success, drugs, and achievement that Tcheng shows us, Halston remains something of a mystery, a galvanizing figure who never fully emerges. But if you're a sucker for a rise-and-fall story or you're interested in fashion, Halston won't disappoint.

She wields power. The movie, not so much.

Dark Phoenix may be the final X-Men movie but it falls short of a grand finale.

Billed as the final chapter in the X-Men series, Dark Phoenix doesn't exactly qualify as the fondest of farewells.

By no means awful, Dark Phoenix nonetheless fails to make a major splash with a concluding chapter that revolves around Jean Grey (Sophie Turner of Game of Thrones fame). Although Jean acquires great powers, she never totally dominates a story that becomes the wobbly foundation on which an uneven variety of set pieces and side trips are built.

A mind-reading mutant, the young Jean (Summer Fontana) falls under Charles Xavier's (James McAvoy) protection after her parents are killed in an auto accident in which she was a passenger and also the cause.

The story then leaps ahead. Now-grown, Jean (Turner) is still learning how to navigate the X-world. An early-picture outer-space rescue mission brings Jean into contact with a force that super-charges her powers in ways she isn't prepared to handle. She leaves the X-Men estate to search for background about her pre-X-Men childhood. She also unleashes terrible destructive powers as she morphs into Phoenix.

With Jean on the verge of raging out of control, the movie begins to question Charles' motives. Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) wonders whether Xavier isn't more interested in bolstering his ego than in maintaining the integrity of the X-Men force. Lawrence, whose superhero alter ego goes by the name Mystique, doesn't seem especially engaged, but she's given the movie's best line.

A rebellious Raven tells Charles that the women always seem to be saving the men in these stories. She wonders whether a name change isn't in order: How about X-Women? Good idea.

Nicholas Hoult's Beast also begins to wonder about Charles' motives. Is Charles putting X-Men in danger to maintain his growing status with humans who, at this moment, are happy to rely on X-Men to save them from whatever disaster happens to loom?

Meanwhile, aliens led by Vuk (Jessica Chastain) try to control Jean whose powers are so great they can be life-giving -- or some such. She might help them revive their moribund civilization, hardly the freshest of ideas.

Tye Sheridan portrays Scott Summers/Cyclops, an X-er who's romantically involved with Jean and who can't accept the fact that she might have become a world-threatening menace.

Michael Fassbender turns up as Erik/Magneto, bringing gravitas to the proceedings, which are dotted with action and special effects, some of them well executed by director Simon Kinberg. CGI and physical combat blend nicely in an extended sequence on a speeding train.

Dark Phoenix doesn't come close to the best and most serious of all the X-Men movies, 2017's Logan. You can also throw in X-Men: First Class (2011) and X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), if you're looking for more of Phoenix's betters.

In general, I've liked the X-Men movies with their devotion to talented outcasts. If Phoenix really marks the end of the series, I'll fondly remember the movies I enjoyed, forget the rest and move on to something else.

A tribute to the imagination of a director

Director Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini takes an episodic approach to Pier Paola Pasolini’s final days.

I've read that Willem Dafoe wore director Pier Paolo Pasolini's clothes and eyeglasses while acting in director Abel Ferrara's simply titled, Pasolini, an ode to the fallen Italian filmmaker.

Pasolini's story can be as intriguing as his movies. The director was found dead on a beach in 1975. Seventeen-year-old Giuseppe Pelosi confessed to the brutal murder, which Ferrara depicts as an extreme act of homophobic rage. Pelosi eventually retracted his confession, and Pasolini's death remains a source of speculation. He had plenty of enemies -- from censorious haters of the sexuality in his films to detractors who abhorred his politics.

Ferrara uses the days leading up to Pasolini's death as a springboard for exploring the imagination of a director who also was a novelist and poet. There was Pasolini's work and then there was the man. Pasolini became a champion of independent-minded art that refused to bow at the altar of social convention.

Ferrara also explores Pasolini's view that every bit of humanity was being wrung out of people by corporate and industrial forces and by their own acquisitiveness. There are no more humans, Pasolini tells an interviewer at one point. The interviewer says that he finds piercing moments of light in Pasolini's work doesn't fully understand them. You may find yourself saying the same about Ferrara's movie.

In ways that unbalance us, the movie includes snippets from a film that Pasolini proposed to make. Ferrara begins with a reference to Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom, Pasolini's last film, a work that was excoriated by some for its graphic, humiliating depictions of sexual exploitation.

Pasolini thoughtfully watches a scene from the film, his demeanor suggesting that he's far more interested in its political implications than in its explicitness.

We also learn that Pasolini lived with his mother (Adriana Asti) and a cousin (Giada Colagrande). His home life appears to be calm, even reflective. He also liked to prowl Rome's streets at night looking for sex, a pursuit that may have led to his demise.

Pasolini's films (from The Gospel According to St. Matthew to The Decameron to Arabian Nights) won him admiration from critics, cineastes and perhaps even from his fellow countrymen. People never have been shy about expressing pride in the renown of certain artists -- even if they don't always understand or approve of them.

Pasolini includes sex and violence but Ferrara (best known for movies such as King of New York, Bad Lieutenant and The Addiction) seems in a reflective mood himself.

Is Pasolini about an important Italian filmmaker, about the Ferrara views of the role of artists or about Pasolini's belief that humanity was poised on the edge of an especially dangerous moment? Perhaps all of the above.

It would be impossible and also unforgivable not to say more about Dafoe's performance. Dafoe not only wears Pasolini's clothes but internalizes his spirit. He even holds our attention when Ferrara shows Pasolini sitting at his typewriter, pounding away at a screenplay.

Think what you will about Pasolini, but know that Dafoe, who speaks in English here and who last played Van Gogh in Julian Schnabel's At Eternity's Gate, is a gift to every director who wants to push the medium's boundaries -- and cinema lovers, as well. Movies would be poorer, staider and less challenging without him.

Bob's Cinema Diary 6/7/19: Woodstock and The Spy Behind Home Plate

Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation

While I was watching Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation, it occurred to me that among my friends -- most of whom belong to the generation to which this documentary's subtitle refers -- haven't mentioned Woodstock in years. The fact that 400,000 people gathered on a farm in upstate New York for a massive rock concert can now seem more like a footnote in the history of the '60s than the main event. And while we're on the subject of the '60s, let me tell you, as someone who lived through that much misunderstood decade, it wasn’t all that great. Directors Barak Goodman and Jamila Ephron’s look at the 1969 three-day event at the dairy farm of Max Yasgur -- a Republican who admired the independence of the concert’s youthful attendees -- reminds us that the event was orchestrated by enthusiasts who did their best to learn as they went. Nostalgia fans will see clips of Joe Cocker, Richie Havens, Joan Baez, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and others, as well as members of The Hog Farm commune, which was run by the estimable Hugh Nanton Romney, a.k.a., Wavy Gravy. Hippies, by the way, do age; Wavy Gravy is now 83. The documentary acknowledges the importance of music in the counterculture but emphasizes Woodstock more as a signifying generational event than a concert. Goodman captures much of the free-form chaos of the '60s and reminds us that on the third day of Woodstock, the rains came, turning a great field on which attendees had assembled into a sea of mud. If you're of a mind, you can take that as a metaphor for what happened to the counterculture. Peace, love, and promise? You know the rest.

The Spy Behind Home Plate

Director Aviva Kempner takes a deep dive into the life of Moe Berg, a Jewish baseball player who became a spy during World War II. The best part of the documentary, The Spy Behind Home Plate, deals with Berg's pre-baseball life and with his time in the Major Leagues. He plied his trade as a catcher for a number of teams. Berg's immigrant father had little interest in baseball. He wanted Berg -- the youngest of three siblings -- to become a lawyer. Although he graduated from Princeton and Columbia Law School, the scholarly Berg never was able to persuade his father to watch him play baseball. The director tells us how Berg became involved with the OSS, the government agency that preceded the CIA. To tell this part of the story, the filmmakers rely on interviews with those who knew what transpired, beginning with Berg's trip to Japan as a member of a Babe Ruth-led all-star tour. Berg's great wartime achievement involved helping to ensure that key Italian physicists didn't wind up working for the Germans. I've read that the film takes a different approach than the fictionalized feature The Catcher Was a Spy, which starred Paul Rudd as Berg. I haven't seen that movie but concluded from this one that although Berg's role in the war effort may have been more important and more interesting than his 15 years playing baseball, that part of the story can drag -- even with attempts to enliven the proceedings with the use Hollywood clips, notably from Alan Ladd's 1946 O.S.S. Still, many people know little about Berg and The Spy Behind Home Plate offers an opportunity to meet a highly idiosyncratic patriot who never lost his love for the national pastime.