TV Review: Extraordinary Attorney Woo (Season 1). Netflix.

A friend who recently found her way into the vast world of South Korean television on Netflix suggested we take a look at this show. We were not disappointed, although it was quite different in many ways from any other show I’ve watched before.

There were a couple of hurdles we had to get over when we first started watching it. The first was that, like most foreign TV shows, it required reading sub-titles. That problem resolved itself while we were watching one of the later episodes in this first season, when I noticed a message while bringing up the show in Netflix that dubbing in English was now available. 

Without doing anything to my settings, when the show came on, it now had American English and slang coming out of the characters' mouths. That was actually a little jarring at first, since we knew from prior shows that these are Koreans in their own native land, who definitely aren’t speaking English. But we got used to it, and it did help not to have to read the sub-titles thereafter.

The other hurdle was getting used to the different norms, cultural standards and behavior of South Korean society, as opposed to our own, and figuring out from the plot what those differences were. It took a little while to get used to that, but it was well worth it, and also culturally enlightening.

But now, the show.  The series tells the story of Woo Young-Woo (played enchantingly by Park Eun-bin), a petite young Korean woman just beginning her career as an attorney. However, she is no ordinary new lawyer, as we find out wonderfully from the opening scenes from her childhood. 

She carries the heavy burden of a serious autism condition, with many of the characteristic abnormal physical mannerisms, difficulties with noise, touch and sensory over-stimulation, and the tendency to make abrupt “too honest” statements that create awkward social situations for her. She also carries the built-in disadvantage (perhaps even heavier there than in our society) of being one of the few women in an ancient profession dominated by men.

But she is also “extraordinary” in that she has a photographic memory, an IQ of 164, and the ability to rapidly analyze every law and statute of the South Korean legal code in her head, and apply it to finding creative solutions to the civil and criminal cases before her. This brilliance, which led her to being the top student in her law school, is a super-power, but it also makes her (at least initially) the envy of her fellow young aspiring attorneys, who are all jockeying for position in a high-end law firm.

Then there is the curious mystery of her parentage. We know who her father is, and he is the loving parent who has raised her, who she loves and with whom she still lives. We don’t know who her mother is at the outset, but as that plot line develops, it becomes another important part of the story, and adds to the more serious and dramatic aspects of Woo Young-Woo’s new life situation as an adult and a lawyer.   

And of course, eventually there’s romance, although it’s no ordinary challenge for her to navigate that otherwise normal life process. How does a person with her disabilities and especially her aversion to touch navigate learning how to love and be close to another person in a romantic way? Yet the results seem both realistic and very satisfying.   

This is an almost unbelievably sweet and enjoyable entertainment. Not unlike most of our TV shows from the United States, the cast is filled with good-looking young actors who are persuasive and engaging in their roles. But at the center of it all is Woo Young-Woo, and the amazing performance of Park Eun-bin in the role, with all her endearing odd behaviors, her kindness, gentleness and wisdom, her search for a role for herself centered on her search for justice and fairness in a tough and complex world, and her encyclopedic knowledge of and love for whales. 

Apparently the show has been renewed for another season. And it’s just so fun!  It's one of my favorite new TV series from the past year, and a great introduction to South Korean television. Highly recommended.

Movie Review: Summerland (2020). Netflix.

This pleasing family drama was a historical period piece about England during the Blitz in World War II, exploring one more of the endless possibilities of circumstance, individuals and relationships that faced life-changing pressures under the savage bombing attacks of a brutal megalomaniac and his industrialized war machine.

I’ve often wondered of late whether the war in Ukraine will spawn a very similar literature over the course of the next hundred years. If it does, I hope they translate the best of it to English. There are few such similar historical analogies before or since World War II, of a modern peaceful urban population suddenly facing an unjust onslaught of death and destruction from a murderous dictator. The millions of Ukrainians who have had to flee with the non-combatant members of their families, or stay and fight and endure, will have countless compelling and dramatic stories to tell, or provide the scenarios for fictional versions of what they and their entire society are currently experiencing.

In Summerland, an irritable young female English writer (peevishly played by Gemma Arterton) in the rural seaside west of England is assigned a young boy evacuee (Lucas Bond) from wartime London during the worst of the bombing, to care for and harbor in her little house. The boy arrives with no warning, and is presented to her by a local civil defense volunteer, who offers no opportunity for the writer to decline the duty of hosting the uninvited pre-teen guest.

In the beginning, the young woman behaves predictably badly. She tries ignoring the boy, and leaves him more or less to fend for himself. But of course as any parent who has lived with a child underfoot knows, that’s not a very promising strategy in the face of a real and present young person with traumas, individual needs and a personality that require an adult hand, direction and wisdom to survive, develop and prosper.

With time and passing events in their daily lives, the writer and the child start to build a bond, a sense of family and caring for each other. And to her credit, she slowly manages to become the generous person and responsible adult the boy needs, even before she learns the surprising news about the real personal connection in her own life that had brought the boy to her.

It’s a charming and heartwarming story, with a happy ending and plot twists I can’t reveal (spoiler alert). It is definitely worth watching, especially if you’re feeling a need for stories of people under duress rising to the occasion, and being kind to each other in the face of unimaginable horrors and dangers. Recommended.

Movie Review: Taylor Swift’s Journey to Fearless (2011). Taylor Swift.

It’s Rock and Roll Friday again here at The Memory Cache, so today I’m highlighting a decade-old documentary and concert video of one of the greatest rock stars (if not the greatest) of the recent musical past and present. I hope you enjoy it!

I might be mistaken, but it seems to me that full-length concert videos of performances and tours by major musical stars are probably becoming a thing of the past. Instead, these days we tend to get mostly brief videos of single songs performed and recorded at shows. These short live song clips usually go straight to YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, and aren't usually all that well compiled or edited.

If it is the end of the era of full-length rock concert tour videos, that would be very unfortunate. A well-made concert video captures much of the excitement of a live performance, with better sound quality and viewer-adjustable sound levels, and crystal-clear images of the performers as good as or better than the view you would get from front-row seats, especially when seen on a large-screen HD TV with a decent sound system. And these videos often capture enough of the joy of hearing one well-loved song after another, played by our favorite musicians before a live audience of their devoted fans, to convey some of the special energy and excitement of the large rock concert experience.

I have a small library of DVDs (remember those?) of concert tours by some of my favorite rock stars. One of the best and more recent such videos in my collection is Taylor Swift’s Journey to Fearless, originally released as a three-part documentary.

It begins with a bit of a biography of Swift, from early childhood to the beginning of her now-legendary career as one of the top country, rock and pop stars of our lifetimes. It is then followed by a full-length film of her performing songs in her Fearless Tour, the first tour in which she was the featured attraction rather than the opening act for more established country stars.

Ms. Swift released a new album last week, Midnights, her tenth studio album. She is by now such a megastar and mature singer-songwriter, musician, entrepreneur, producer, director, social media influencer, and artist that it is hard to believe that someone with so many professional talents and accomplishments to her credit is still only 32 years old.

I “discovered” Taylor Swift's music well along in her career. I only started listening to her in 2020, with the release of her pandemic-era smash hit album Folklore, which immediately won her a Grammy. That was the first music of hers that I’d noticed, even though of course I knew she was a huge pop star, who everyone had been talking about for a long while.

Of course, it isn’t surprising that I hadn’t paid attention to her before. She and her storied career really belong to other more recent generations, the Millennials and maybe Gen Z particularly, and her fan base skews heavily female. But even as a male rock music fan from an earlier era, I was immediately taken with her evocative storytelling, her lyrics, her voice, the range of emotions she conveys, her sense of humor, the musical styles she has embraced and explored, and the sheer magnetism of her public personality. So as a newcomer to her and her music, I bought a DVD copy of Journey to Fearless online to get more of a sense of her as a musician and performer than I could get just by listening to her studio albums.

It turned out that this video provides not just concert footage, but considerable insight into many aspects of the rise of this truly remarkable artist. The documentary begins by tracing the path she followed in becoming a star, from her childhood obsession with writing and performing songs for her family and friends, her family’s move to Nashville when she was 14 to support her relentless adolescent drive to build a life and career as a musician, her first lucky breaks, her mistakes and opportunities getting a recording contract, and the release of her first album, the eponymously named Taylor Swift.

From there, we learn about her early touring experiences opening for other country music acts, and the explosive release of her second album Fearless, which was soon charting massive sales to her increasingly energized fan base. We then discover how the success of these first two albums led to her first headlining tour, the Fearless Tour, which played at arenas around the world for more than a year in 2009 and 2010.  

At the end of the pre-concert documentary sections, we learn how much Swift participated in creating many aspects of the show and the tour, in addition to the musical performances. She apparently provided direction and inspiration for the construction of the stunning stage design and lighting, which were based on her love of theatrics and fairy tales. She is credited in the video as a producer for sets and stage design, the music, the dancing, the costumes, the video production, and pretty much every other aspect of the tour and the film documentary made about it.

When I saw the credits at the end of the video, I was simply amazed that a new artist not yet even 21 years old was so thoroughly involved in creating every aspect of a complex, sophisticated tour and multi-media production, which ultimately grossed more than $66 million, put on 118 arena shows across the USA and abroad, and was seen by more than a million fans.  

When I watched the performance portion of the video, I was similarly astonished. In performing 13 of her by-now iconic songs from the tour, we see her singing, backed by a tight band of top-flight rock and country musicians, and accompanying herself beautifully on the piano, as well as playing a large variety of acoustic and electric guitars, a banjo, a ukulele, and probably a few other instruments I’ve forgotten. She also often danced, along with a small troupe of professional dancers and backup singers, and performed some short musical theatrical scenes in support of the stories of some of the songs. At one point she even flew high over the crowd in an elevated lift, singing her parts perfectly without missing a beat.

The lighting was spectacular, the special effects continuous. She reputedly did roughly eight costume changes per show, and she was the center of attention every moment at every single concert, surrounded by her rapt and adoring fans, many of them young girls her own age and younger, who  were there past bedtime with their happy parents. It was like Disney World on steroids, combined with a fantastic rock and roll extravaganza, all as envisioned and performed by a brilliant multi-dimensional talent and precocious megastar, who was only 20 years old at the time, and doing all this for the first time in her career.

We’ve all been hearing about Taylor Swift since she was 15 years old – it’s hard to believe it’s already been so many years since she first appeared. But this powerful documentary and concert video demonstrate clearly how and why the blockbuster career of this unique pop music and cultural icon came to be, and why she continues to fascinate and thrill her millions of loyal fans around the world. Highly recommended.  

Book Review: Flight of Passage (1997). Rinker Buck.

Hello! As you may have noticed, I’ve been on a mini-sabbatical of sorts the past few weeks. My music and video production activities have been at an unusually high rate recently, which is part of it, but I’ve also been focused on some other personal matters that temporarily took priority. I suppose in the long run this happens to everyone, whether they’re working at a paid job, or just treating a hobby as though it were one!

But just to reassure you – I haven’t gone anywhere, and I haven’t lost interest in writing this blog and posting my reviews yet – quite the opposite. I’ll be back with more reviews in the next couple of weeks, plus let’s not forget that tomorrow is Rock and Roll Friday here at The Memory Cache. I’ll have something new for that.

Today though, I wanted to write a review about a book which has been in print for 25 years (so it’s a 25-year anniversary review, right?), but actually I’m reviewing it because it is one of my very favorite books and coming of age stories ever, and I wanted to share it with you.

Rinker Buck is a writer and former journalist who started his writing career as a recent college graduate in the early 1970s. He has gained considerable acclaim over the years for his newspaper and magazine writing, but in the mid-1990s he decided it was time to give his own account of a remarkable episode from his teenage years, back in the mid-1960s, which led him to write this book.

That episode was a several-week-long trip he took across the continental United States with his older brother Kernahan in a tiny 2-seat Piper Cub from the 1940s, which the brothers first expertly rebuilt over the previous winter before setting out on their epic journey. By the end of it, due in no small part to the unsolicited promotional efforts of their father, the trip and the two boys were headline news across the country. It was a lot to handle for a 15-year adolescent, and his 17-year-old brother with a new pilot’s license, and less than 100 hours of “pilot in command” experience.

That’s the core of the story. But there is so much more to it. Not surprisingly, this book and the exploits of the two Buck boys are legend within the aviation community, where pilots of many generations have delighted in Rinker’s descriptions of the challenges of flying and navigating a small, fragile airplane with no radio through terrible weather, high mountains, and across wide plains, using old-fashioned piloting techniques like following roads and rivers, reading paper charts, and using only a simple compass to find their way, without any GPS or modern location-finding equipment aboard. And it is a terrific story for those elements alone, which appeal to the adventurous spirit of all pilots, as well as those of us who love stories of dangerous travel, exploration, individual bravery and overcoming the fear of the unknown.

But wait, there’s more! It turns out that Rinker and his brother were the two oldest brothers in a very large Irish Catholic family, at precisely that time in American history when these sorts of families were inherently interesting to the public, due to the recent prominence of the Kennedy family and the fascination with the JFK presidency. And at the head of their family was an eccentric, larger than life but overbearing father, a disabled survivor of plane crashes, with an epic younger life as a barnstorming pilot in the 1920s and 1930s, and a determination to see his two oldest sons follow in his daring early aviation footsteps.

So Rinker’s story is anything but just the narration of an exciting youthful experience. Instead, throughout, he writes hilarious and moving anecdotes, insightful observations and wonderful smart-alecky dialogue that capture perfectly all the dynamics of his complex relationships with his father and his older brother, as well as other members of his large and lively family.

As the story unfolds, he paints a vivid picture of how the two brothers learned to work together not only to rebuild and fly their plane, and dream up and complete their own defining personal adventure, but also to become the young men they soon would be, both because of and yet also in spite of their father’s hopes and dreams for them.

This is a coming of age story that is truly extraordinary, but also somehow so universal. It captures perfectly that moment where we set out to take on the world, while trying to figure out how to cut ourselves loose from the ties of love and parental expectations that bind us to our parents and families. Flight of Passage is definitely high on my lifetime “best books” list. Very highly recommended.

Book Reviews: Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History (2008), Thomas Norman DeWolf, and The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning (2022), Ben Raines.

Earlier today, I posted a review of The Sweetness of Water, an outstanding novel of life in the immediate aftermath of the end of the Civil War and slavery in the South.

For readers interested in reading more on the history of slavery, the slave trade, the impacts of the Civil War and the collective responsibility of white society for the ongoing consequences of racism against slaves and their modern African-American descendants, there are two other non-fiction books I’ve read recently which bear mentioning here. Both should be available from local libraries and online booksellers.

In Inheriting the Trade, the author, Thomas Norman DeWolf, told the story of the production of a documentary film made in the early 2000s about the efforts of a dozen descendants of a wealthy Rhode Island family to collectively discover and come to terms with the role played by their influential rich white ancestors in contributing to and profiting from the slave trade throughout much of its ugly history.

A relative of mine told me that the documentary film that was the product of this family's project, as recounted in this book, has continued up to the present day to be an influential media resource within the Episcopal Church community nationwide, in the church’s efforts to come to terms with white complicity in the slave trade and its legacy, in trying to support anti-racist and social justice movements, and in discussing controversial ideas such as the quest for reparations for the descendants of slaves.

Inheriting the Trade asks many of us who are white, particularly those whose families have been in North America since the early days of European colonization, and especially those in the North, where many wrongly believe “the North wasn’t involved in slavery”, to think more deeply about how the evils of slavery and the slave trade advantaged our own ancestors, and about what individual responsibilities we might have to try to make amends for that, even at this late date. Recommended. 

 

I also recently read a new non-fiction history book, The Last Slave Ship, by Ben Raines. Mr. Raines is a historian who was tracking down the little-known story of the Clotilda, a sailing ship that was used by several conspirators from Alabama to bring a load of African slaves to the United States shortly before the Civil War.

This slave voyage was noteworthy, because it occurred decades after slave importation had become illegal in the United States. The apparent purpose of the voyage was to win a bet, by proving that it was still possible to bring new slaves to the South from Africa, despite aggressive maritime enforcement against it by the United States, England and other European countries. And indeed the plotters were successful in buying more than a hundred slaves on the African coast, and managing to transport most of them alive, and into slavery in Alabama.

Among my many other reading interests, I’ve always enjoyed stories of deep-sea exploration for famous old sunken wrecks, which is what I expected to be the focus of this book. In fact, though, the recent discovery and partial recovery of the Clotilda, which was burned and scuttled by the owners shortly after the slaves were brought ashore, in order to destroy the evidence of the plotters' crimes, forms only a minor part of the narrative. 

The author was more interested in telling the story of the more than 100 “late-arriving” slaves from the Clotilda, who were freed at the end of the Civil War, only a few years after they were brought here against their will, but who then maintained a relatively isolated community in Alabama called Africatown, where many of their African traditions from before slavery were preserved well into the twentieth century.

This book is not the most lively account I’ve read on various aspects of the several hundred year history of slavery – in parts, the writing seemed a little plodding -- but it is a unique story from that history which apparently has not been told before, and it needed to be. Recommended.

Book Review: The Sweetness of Water (2021). Nathan Harris.

I picked up this recent first novel by Nathan Harris, which became an immediate bestseller and an award-winner last year, based on rave reviews from my wife and several friends in her book club who had already read it. It did not disappoint – it’s a beautifully told story of white and black characters trying to survive and find meaning in the deep South, in the midst of the social turmoil at the end of the Civil War.

The slaves have been freed, and the Union Army arrives in town to enforce the new social order. That doesn’t protect the freed slaves from the hostility, fear, racism and hatred of much of the white population, but it has opened the door to some new opportunities and possibilities.

If this were just a book about the struggles of recently freed slaves in the aftermath of the Civil War, it would still be remarkable, but it is so much more than that. At the center of the story is an old white man George and his wife Isabelle, living alone on their farm outside of town, as they await news of the fate of their son Caleb, a Confederate soldier in the war. 

Caleb turns out to be a complex character himself; once we learn his story, it’s revealed that he is something of a disgrace, and is carrying several heavy secrets that could exact a terrible price on him and his family if they were revealed. Yet he is an only child, and is still loved by his parents.

Then there are two young brothers, Prentiss and Landry, freed slaves who George first encounters in the woods near his home. Out of their basic human decency and kindness, and perhaps measures of guilt, both George and Isabelle each slowly become involved with the two brothers, and try to help them get a start on their new lives, in part to fill their own feelings of loss and loneliness.

Under the stresses of their world and their individual situations, we come to learn ever more about these five people, and a number of other characters that come in and out of their lives. Through their eyes, we experience something of the intense social pressures at play in the small southern town, and we feel the savage cruelty and intolerance of the many, but also the human kindnesses and vulnerabilities to be found among individuals, even within a community poisoned by prejudice.

The exploration of the emotional dynamics of the marital relationship between George and Isabelle is particularly moving. It captures perfectly the search for balance and harmony between two different (and difficult) personalities in a long-term love relationship, and probes some of the different ways in which compassionate people try to come to terms with their own guilt and responsibility for the monstrous crimes of the unjust society they inhabit.

The Sweetness of Water is one of the most satisfying and realistic stories I’ve read about what social life looked like in the late 1860s in the South, as the Civil War ended and southern society tried to figure out what to do next. It is certainly not a hopeful portrait of where things were headed, yet for these characters, we’re left with some sense of redemption and the promise of better lives for the future.

This is a truly excellent fictional account of a difficult historical period, with strong resonance in our own society today, more than a century and a half later. Highly recommended.

TV Review: Alaska Daily (2022). ABC.

Our local Seattle paper, The Seattle Times, is one of a few major city newspapers nationally that is still family owned and independent. Four generations of the Blethen family have owned and shepherded the paper through more than a century of American history, including wars, depression and recession, the rise of the internet, and the onslaught of the colossal media empires that have consolidated (and frequently gutted) most of the other news organizations across the country under the control of a few super-rich owners and private equity firms.

Because of the paper’s own history, The Seattle Times editorial board carries regular coverage of the ongoing struggle of local journalism to survive in the face of massive revenue losses and media consolidation, and the paper advocates tirelessly for the support of local journalism as a critical source of important news and investigations on the local level, as an indispensable component of a functioning democracy. 

So it was not surprising that in a column I read in The Seattle Times on this same topic last week, there was a review and a pitch for a new prime-time ABC dramatic series, just launched, called Alaska Daily. 

Loosely based on a real newspaper, The Alaska Daily News in Anchorage, it tells the story of Eileen Fitzgerald, a successful, driven New York investigative journalist (played superbly by Hillary Swank). Disgraced and unfairly forced out of her prestigious job because of an inadequately sourced (but true) story about a corrupt official, she is recruited by an old colleague to move to Anchorage to work for a small, poorly funded local newspaper, the fictional Daily Alaskan.

Having now watched the first two episodes of Alaska Daily, I am really excited about this show and its prospects. I don’t watch many shows from the “big 3” old networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) – The Good Fight is the only other show from these networks in my active list at the moment – but this one is off to a great start.

I generally enjoy a good “fish out of water” story, especially the ones where the main protagonist is a big city slicker suddenly forced to survive in a smaller, rural community, where the opinions, resources and relationships are different, but the people, their lives and loves are just as real as back in the city, and where the need for personal change, adaptability and growth (for all the characters) are the inevitable drivers of the dramatic tensions in the story, and the clash of two cultures.

In just two episodes, Swank has set up this story and her character powerfully and convincingly. As a journalist, she comes across as a force of nature – fast-moving, quick to understand how to get information and find sources to interview, yet direct to the point of rudeness, arrogant and inflexible in her dealings with her colleagues, and almost ruthless in her determination to get the story.

She seems cold and unlikable on first impression, but she also struggles with emotional anxiety, and shows glimmers of a passion and care for the people whose lives are affected by the stories she covers that hint at much more depth than the self-centered careerist ambitions we (and other characters) might assume are driving her. In other words, she’s a complex and interesting character, ripe for the sort of change and personal growth we expect in a "fish out of water" story like this.  At the same time, it's clear already that her big-city sophistication will bring new tools and effectiveness to the dedicated small-town reporters around her.

I would watch this show just to see how her character develops, but there is a lot more going on too. Much of it has to do with showing the fascinating reality of the lives of local journalists – the relationships between the reporters, editors and newsroom staff, the perils of asking tough questions of vulnerable and often hostile sources, and the creative ways investigative journalists find information and verify it in solving mysteries and telling stories, much like police detectives, but without the power of guns and the state to compel cooperation on the part of witnesses.

One of my other all-time favorite shows was The Newsroom (on HBO), produced by Aaron Sorkin, about a fictional cable news organization during the Obama presidency (also highly recommended, if you haven’t seen it). Alaska Daily is the first dramatic series I've seen since then that appears to be ready to portray the lives of working reporters investigating real-world stories. 

The Newsroom gave a fictional view of cable television journalists following major national news and politics; Alaska Daily instead shows print journalists in a small media market, working on major regional stories, beginning with the ongoing tragedy of Indigenous women who continue to be abducted, trafficked and murdered at a horrifying rate in Alaska and across the west, in most cases with little apparent notice or accountability.

This particular first investigation in the show mirrors a real one that has been conducted and published by The Alaska Daily News. But I expect in the course of Alaska Daily’s opening season, and perhaps future seasons (if the show is continued), we will see other story lines and investigations as well.

One other thing that is noteworthy about this new show – it’s about Alaska. In 2019, just before the pandemic, my wife and I took our first trip to see Alaska, including Anchorage. And it really is a special and unusual place, which I felt again immediately when I started watching the show.

Alaska has such unique features, like the fact that you can’t get to many places in the state except by flying in small planes; the routine presence of very large wild animals nearby, like moose, elk and bear; the extremes of the seasons, the long summer days and the long winter nights, the bitter winter cold and isolation – all of these factors and more make for a special kind of place, where communities are small and close-knit of necessity, yet are still torn by the same political splits, personality clashes, prejudices and competing economic interests we find everywhere else. These are themes I also expect to see explored in this show.

One can never make a completely accurate prediction about the fate, or the ultimate quality, of a brand new television series, based on the first couple of shows. And I may be wrong, but I think that Alaska Daily has more going for it out of the gate than most other new series I know about, particularly on the big 3 networks. Check it out, and see what you think! Highly recommended.

Movie Review: A Call to Spy (2019). Netflix.

In the past few decades, many of the greatest espionage secrets of the British and American governments from World War II have finally been revealed. As I’ve mentioned in several other reviews, this has led to a growing awareness and increasing coverage of the important roles played by women in some of the most dangerous and sensitive Allied secret organizations and operations, in helping to win the war against the Axis powers.

The many books, memoirs, movies and TV shows that have followed these gradual revelations are endlessly fascinating and intriguing, while also making some of the same points over and over: women were often effective as spies, code breakers and operatives in part because they were less suspected by the opposition than the men were. 

At the same time, they had to constantly battle within their own organizations for respect, assignments and positions due to the same heavy sexism and “old boy networks” that dominated the leadership of all the warring societies of the times. And they could be very tough and resourceful, sometimes more so than most of the men around them.

Among the by-now most widely recognized and revered women spies who fought in the secret war against the Nazis are the three who are the main subjects of this Netflix docudrama, A Call to Spy. The first, Vera Atkins (played ably here by Stana Katic), was a Jewish woman from Romania who was an early recruit to the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Winston Churchill’s secret organization for waging clandestine war against the Axis powers. From a humble start in a clerical position, she rapidly rose to a role as a leading organizer of SOE secret operations in Europe.

The SOE’s primary assignment was “to set Europe ablaze” with sabotage, spying and subversion. Atkins’ storied career included some dangerous early assignments she herself carried out, but her greatest contribution to SOE was in recruiting and running female agents, and helping to build the clandestine networks the SOE set up in occupied France.

Virginia Hall (Sarah Megan Thomas) was one of the agents recruited by Atkins to the SOE, who became one of the Nazi’s most hunted enemies in the secret war in France. An American woman with a partially amputated leg from a hunting accident, who wore a wooden prosthetic leg as a result, Hall was nevertheless a brilliant operative and network leader, who survived many dangerous actions and repeatedly avoided capture to become one of the leading Allied agents in France. 

Remarkably, and despite her physical handicap, she did all this during two different long tours in France, the first with the British SOE as an agent/network leader early in the war, and then later (after the SOE considered her "blown" because of her notoriety and the German price on her head) with William Donovan’s American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), where she served as a wireless operator and a key agent in organizing support for the French resistance. She went on to a long career with the American CIA after the war.

Noor Inayat Khan (Radhika Apte) was an Englishwoman, born in Russia of Indian parents, who became a wireless operator in the WAAF (the British women’s air force auxiliary), from which she was recruited by Atkins. She eventually become the first female wireless operator sent into occupied France. 

Wireless operators had the difficult but vital job as secret agents of serving as the main communications link back to the SOE in England for entire networks of spies in France, by quickly tapping out coded radio messages from fellow agents on a teletype key. They carried out this dangerous mission, while having to constantly move to new “safe houses”, and find new hiding places for their suitcase-sized radio equipment and antennas, while also trying to evade aggressive radio tracking by French police and Nazi counter-intelligence agents.

Khan’s doomed career was particularly noteworthy, because she was the first Moslem agent in the British secret services. She was arrested in 1944, and sent to Dachau concentration camp, where she died before the end of the war.

The remarkable and heroic stories of these three famous female spies, their close relationships with each other and with their colleagues, and the sacrifices they made, is a lot to pack into a single movie, but A Call to Spy is a worthy attempt. It’s a suspenseful and moving entertainment as well as an inspiring World War II story of women at war. Recommended.