During World War II, a Spaniard named Joan Pujol Garcia quixotically put himself to work as a spy for the Nazis and delivered them an ocean of intelligence, virtually all of it phony. Working, at first, entirely on his own, Pujol set himself up in Lisbon, but told his Nazi handlers that he was in England. He invented an entire network of British sub-spies and informants and made up intelligence attributed to them. He was so prolific and considered so reliable that the Nazis actually mounted troop and naval deployments based on his completely fallacious reports.
Eventually, the Allies learned of Pujol’s work and brought him in as a double agent, using him to feed misinformation to Berlin, including the massive (and shockingly successful) lie that the June, 1944, invasion of Normandy was a deceptive feint meant to distract the Germans from a larger landing that was due at any moment in Calais (and which, of course, was never in the cards).
This is can’t-miss stuff, but director Edmon Roch can’t stop fidgeting enough to tell it straight. Absent images of Pujol doing his work, Roch illustrates the film with clips from Hollywood movies: “Patton,” “Mata Hari,” Peter Lorre as Mr. Moto, and, most pertinently, Alec Guinness in “Our Man in Havana,” Graham Greene’s farcical tale of a lying pseudo-spy. This is cute, but it somewhat dilutes the documentary air. For heft, Roch enlists a series of talking heads: historians, journalists, former intelligence agents. But, again, he can’t stop fussing: he doesn’t, for instance, identify any of them by name or credentials until more than halfway through the film. All this attention-getting craft is, finally, genuinely distracting from a tale that, truly, needs no goosing.
Pujol was nicknamed ‘Garbo’ by his British handlers because they thought he was the greatest actor they’d ever met. Roch, on the other hand, delivers this tale with such a cheeky and clumsy air that he’ll never be known by anyone as ‘Hitchcock.’
(88 min., unrated, probably PG, Living Room Theaters) Grade: B-minus