Title: Garbo: The Spy

Opens: November 18, 2011

In his psychotic memoir “Mein Kampf,” Hitler stated the principle of the Big Lie; that is, the larger the lie, the more likely that people will accept it as truth. This is because most people tell small lies and can tell when others are fibbing. When a lie is colossal, most people cannot believe that anyone could make up such extreme falsehoods. Luckily for us in the civilized part of the world, Hitler was fooled by a Big Lie that his enemies concocted, leading to a massive defeat by Germany per the Normandy Invasion on June 6, 1944 albeit with great loss of the Allied forces that took the beachhead.

Employing English, Spanish, Catalan and German, Edmon Roch focuses on one particular enemy of Germany, a double agent working for British Intel known as Garbo because he was a great actor. Spaniard Juan Pujol García, whom some call The Spy Who Saved the World (no lie), is the man that few people know, perhaps because he did not try to glorify himself even at war’s end. In fact he gave the impression that he had settled in Angola and had died of malaria when in fact he spent his post-war time in Venezuela working for an oil company.

What was Pujol like and what did he do? His achievements are given celluloid in a doc that on the one hand spends too much time on talking heads but on the other hand is filled with some fascinating file films, both archives from the war and, largely for comical effect, a bevy of old productions zeroing in on the spy trade and on the Normandy invasion. Those old films include “Patton,” “The Longest Day,” “Our Man in Havana,” “Pimpernel Smith,” “Invisible Agent,” “The Secret Code,” “British Intelligence,” and “Mata Hari.” No narration was used in the doc and Fernando Velázquez’s music does much to set the light tone.

Along with the pronouncements of Nigel West, M15 specialist Mark Seaman, Xavier Vinader and the Countess of Romanones Aline Griffith, director Roch traces Pujol’s quirky life before the war. He had hid during the Spanish Civil War. He applied to British Intelligence five times before he was accepted using the name Arabel, convinced Germany to hire him as their agent, invented a team of 27 agents all of whom did not exist, even convincing the Germans that one of these agents had died. The German government responded by giving his widow a pension.

Pujol pretended that he was in London, digging up information that could help the German side, when in fact he had remained in Lisbon while doing his spy work. In his greatest feat, he convinced the Germans that the Allied invasion expected in mid-1944 would take place in Calais. After Normandy was invaded, however, he insisted that this was just a diversion from the true mission: to land in Calais. Without that false intelligence, the Germans could have accumulated a force strong enough to rebuff the entire Allied mission. He is the only person known to have been decorated by both Germany (The Iron Cross) and Britain (Member of the British Empire).

The doc could have been better had director Roch deleted most of the clips from commercial movies, those that dealt with spying in general, and supplied more footage of “Mata Hari,” the one most most relevant to Pujol’s illustrious career.

Story – B

Unrated. 87 minutes. (c) 2011 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online