Mighty Movie Podcast: Edmon Roch on <em>Garbo: The Spy</em>

Of all the film clips director Edmon Roch uses to compose his WW II documentary, Garbo: The Spy -- and they include such eclectic sources as documentaries, dramas, both Allied and Nazi propaganda, and cartoons -- the ones he seems to rely on most come from Carol Reed's Our Man in Havana, the film where Alec Guinness snookers the British Secret Service by fabricating a network of Cuban-based spies. Turns out that the story's original author, Graham Greene, didn't come up with that idea from whole cloth -- during the war, a mysterious Spaniard operating in Great Britain was able to convince the Nazis that the D-day landing at Normandy was just a diversion for the actual invasion, all thanks to information provided by his own, equally fictional informants.

Garbo: The Spy explores both the history of that spy, Juan Pujol Garcia -- known to the Germans as Alaric, "Man of Trust," and to the British as Garbo -- and how the story of his pivotal role in the war was uncovered by a group of journalists, writers, and scholars. Roch brings a wry outlook to the story -- fitting, given Pujol's rather unusual background -- and turns a shadowy corner of history into an entertaining tale of high-stakes deception.

Click on the player to hear my interview with Roch.

See the trailer at Mighty Movie Podcast