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The story sounds like great fodder for a movie, and that's what it has become: "The Catcher Was a Spy," based on a 1994 biography of the same name by Nicholas Dawidoff, opens Friday in theaters. Paul Rudd (who happens to be Jewish) stars as Berg alongside Mark Strong and Sienna Miller.

The film begins in 1939, his last season as a player, with the Boston Red Sox, before picking up several years later when Berg has a boring desk job at the OSS. His boss, Gen. William Donovan (played by Jeff Daniels), eventually assigns him a mission in the field, and with Sam Goudsmit (Paul Giamatti), Berg helps rescue the Italian physicist Eduardo Amaldi from the Nazis.

A more crucial assignment is to kill the famous German physicist Werner Heisenberg, a task with which Berg is not completely comfortable. There is no certainty that Germany has the resources to build a bomb (the Brits don't believe they do) or even that Heisenberg, despite being a loyal German, will help them build a weapon of mass destruction. But Donovan decides not to take a chance and orders the hit.

Berg was an enigma to most who knew him, and the film, directed by the Australian filmmaker Ben Lewin, paints a nuanced portrait of the complicated character. Though he had a longtime girlfriend, Estella (Sienna Miller), some questioned his sexual orientation. The general asks him point blank at one point if he's "queer," but Berg doesn't answer. (Later in life, Berg became unemployed and subsisted with the help of relatives.)

As a whole, though, the movie falls in a bland area between truth and fiction. While Berg's missions are fascinating on paper, the content isn't particularly cinematic, the way a good James Bond film is. So while the end product stays honest to the facts, it sacrifices some enjoyment for the viewer.

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