“There’s something I have to tell you:” As an 18-year-old undergraduate at Harvard, Ted Hall was recruited to help Robert Oppenheimer and his team develop a weapon that would alter the course of human history. When the Atomic Bomb was detonated twice the following year, over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hall did not share in his colleagues’ enthusiasm for the Manhattan Project. Due to his fears that the United States, having a monopoly over an ineffably destructive power, would cause a nuclear catastrophe, he relayed the bomb’s secrets to the Soviet Union. “A Compassionate Spy,” the latest work from acclaimed director Steve James (“Hoop Dreams”), details Hall’s life from the vantage point of Joan, his wife. The couple met after the war, sharing a love for knowledge and classical music. They would go on to share a life and a secret with one another for over five decades, all while government surveillance loomed in the distance like a mushroom cloud.
The arrival of “A Compassionate Spy” comes at an interesting time. The film will further deepen interest in the Manhattan Project, its major players, and its intimate and collective aftermaths alongside the highly anticipated release of “Oppenheimer,” helmed by Christopher Nolan, in July. Nearly 80 years after the detonation of the first atomic bomb, this unparalleled scientific achievement continues to instill fear, awe, and anxiety.
Magnolia Pictures will release “A Compassionate Spy” in theaters and VOD on August 4, two days before the 78th anniversary of the United States detonating an atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima and five days before the bombing of Nagasaki. Watch the new trailer below.
 doc 'A Compassionate Spy' charts the plight of a physicist who shared atomic bomb secrets with the Soviet Union.){kind=link}