The life of Juan Pujol is begging for a big-budget production from a major director. It’s “Zelig” meets “The Longest Day.”
The documentary “Garbo: The Spy” is the story of Pujol, a well-to-do Barcelona man whose career in confused identity got going in earnest when, during the Spanish Civil War, he joined the Republican side with the intention of defecting to the Fascists. At one point, he thought he had sneaked into the trenches with the Franco lovers — but was actually still with the Republicans. Their response to his cry that he was a Republican defector loyal to Franco was a volley of bullets that Pujol narrowly escaped, or so he said.
Pujol’s claim to be an important historical footnote came a few years later, when he volunteered himself as a freelance spy for the Germans. By sending them information he found in libraries, he convinced them that he could be useful — though by then he was no longer a Fascist and was really angling for a job spying on behalf of the Allies, who eventually took him on, moved him to London (where, convinced he was “the world’s greatest actor,” they code-named him Garbo) and made him a key player in their Normandy strategy. In part because of Pujol’s steady output of misinformation, accompanied by crazed Hitlerian ranting, the Germans continued to believe, for weeks after June 6, 1944, that the main attack was to come elsewhere at the Pas de Calais. If the Fuehrer’s men had launched a counterattack at Normandy, I might be writing this in German.
Fascinating though it is, the movie is thin on historical materials. The vast majority of the information is simply fed to us through talking heads, so for visuals we get stock footage cut to look campy. Though there are comic elements to the story, the attempts at making WW II seem silly feel far off-base, and at any rate the endless repetition of goofy propaganda images becomes annoying.