Edmon Roch’s film “Garbo the Spy” is not about the actress Greta Garbo, but a Spanish  man named Juan Pujol García who was known under the code name “Garbo” to the British intelligence. This chaotic 2009 movie, also known as “Garbo, the Man Who Saved the World” and “Garbo: El Espia” illustrates how the ingenuity of one man changed the direction of World War II. The documentary premiered in Europe and the U.S. in 2009 and is just now making the rounds of the Laemmle Theatres. If you can make it through the first few minutes, there’s a wealth of material here to fire your imagination and cause you to reconsider the power of one and how wars are won.

Garcia was known under a different code name to the Nazis for whom he originally began spying for. The trouble is, García had first volunteered his services for MI5. Although he was rejected, he began fabricating a network of spies and fed false information to the Nazis. Born in Barcelona, García had developed an extreme distaste for the German Nazis who were involved in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), including the bombing of Guernica in 1937 and trained nationalist forces. Adolf Hitler also encouraged Benito Mussolini to assist Francisco Franco.

García began collecting information from newsreels and libraries and giving the information to the Nazis while pretending that he was in Britain. He’s submitted expense reports. The value of this real information mixed with misinformation came to the attention of the British.

Only then did the British decide to enlist him. Garcia moved to Britain in 1942 and became a double agent under the spymaster Cyril Bertram Mills. He was able to bluff his way using excuses such as an illness forcing an agent to be late in reporting information and then conveniently reported the agents death (which was then listed in the local newspaper) and requesting a pension for the equally fictional widow.

His fictional network at one time had a total of 27 agents and was called Arabel and was the leader, Garcia, was known as Alaric. With the Nazis paying all of the Arabel agents, they were essentially financing part of MI5’s operations. Garcia was instrumental in misdirecting the Nazis about the D-Day invasion.

Decorated by both the Nazis and the British, Garcia faked his death and moved to Venezuela where he ran a bookstore.  He died at age 76 in 1988.

The documentary shows clips of Hollywood movies such as “Patton,” “The Longest Day,” “Mata Hari” (with Greta Garbo), “Mr. Moto’s Last Warning”, and “Our Man in Havana.” This insertion of movies–mostly untitled and unidentified, at times is a bit jarring, if not confusing. The documentary also includes interviews with novelist and intelligence expert Nigel West, MI5 specialist Mark Seaman, journalist Xavier Vinader, Aline Griffith a World War II spy; Garcia’s family and footage of Garcia himself.

Is it all true? Hard to say. Aline Griffith has been criticized as not being totally reliable in her accounts. What stories Garcia would have had to tell, but he seems to have kept quiet.

This isn’t a great documentary. Roch, who was one of the co-writers, needed a better editor, yet this documentary exposes an intriguing account about spies and spying during World War II. One wishes for more spy stories, fictional or factual or inspired by, about this one man who used his imagination to help defeat the Nazis and the Fascists.  And this spy, Garcia, never fired a shot. His weapons were words; maybe the pen is mightier than the sword.

“Garbo: The Spy” opens at the Laemmle Music Hall 3 on 25 November 2011. In English, Spanish, Catalan and German. It is currently not scheduled to come to Pasadena.