A COMPASSIONATE SPY

A Compassionate Spy is a gripping real-life spy thriller about Manhattan Project physicist Ted Hall, who provided nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union, told through the perspective of his loving wife Joan, who protected his secret for decades. Recruited in 1944 as an 18-year-old Harvard undergraduate to help Robert Oppenheimer and his team create a bomb, Hall was the youngest physicist on the Manhattan Project, and didn’t share his colleagues’ elation after the successful detonation of the world’s first atomic bomb. Concerned that a U.S. post-war monopoly on such a powerful weapon could lead to nuclear catastrophe, Hall began passing key information about the bomb’s construction to the Soviet Union. After the war, he met, fell in love with, and married Joan, a fellow student with whom he shared a passion for classical music and socialist causes — and the explosive secret of his espionage.

Directed by Steve James | 106 minutes | 2023

James’s sleek telling excels at intertwining the personal and the political with illuminating detail. – The Guardian

The subject of this absorbing documentary might be the brilliant atomic physicist Theodore Alvin Hall, but its star is his nonagenarian widow, Joan. Funny and candid this delightful woman is eager to share her unwavering support for her husband’s espionage during World War II. – The New York Times

It’s worth being reminded by James’s layered, grippingly told account of a principled betrayal that when it comes to the biggest threats facing the globe, sometimes one person in the right circumstance can make a difference.- The Wrap

a spellbinding collage concerning the life and times of Ted Hall and his family. It is a wonderful documentary, and I encourage everyone who wants a greater sense of the story of the Atomic Age to check it out. – Film Threat