Spione (Spies) (review)

Clocking in at 145 minutes, this crisp print of Spione returns it almost to its original length, a vast improvement over the truncated 90-minute versions available to date. It was recently restored by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung based upon a nitrate print in the National Film Archive in Prague (Národní filmový archiv), with additional material from holdings in France, Austria, Russia, and Australia. This version allows us to reassess—as well as more fully enjoy—a work that usually plays a marginal role in Fritz Lang’s oeuvre. It was his first film after Metropolis, which was a financial disaster, so the faults of the previous work must have been very much on his mind. (Indeed, one of the few funny scenes in Spione, which is surprisingly devoid of humor for a film of such length, involves the hero dashing down a street festooned with posters advertising Metropolis.) With the usual assistance of Thea von Harbou, his wife and preferred scriptwriter, he returned to the formula of his earlier Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), and employed Rudolf Klein-Rogge, who had played Mabuse, to act the role of Haghi, the nefarious spymaster.

The film starts with aplomb. After the screen announces that “throughout the world . . . strange events transpire” we see a sequence of rapid cuts in which documents are stolen from the safe of the French embassy in Shanghai, a leering motorcyclist guns down a minister of transportation in an open car, radio towers beam news of these events to the world, frantic bureaucrats rifle through files, and a leather-jacketed courier is shot just as he is about to tell an official the identity of the perpetrator. When the official grabs his head in horror and rhetorically asks what power is behind it all, we see the glowering face of Haghi, followed by the word “ICH.” We eventually learn that the front of his operation is the Haghi Bank, but hidden behind it is a vast, multistory bureau referred to simply as the “Zentrale.” Its involvement in international espionage operations is signaled by the polyglot signs in the corridors (in English, French, Russian, and German). Though the film is set explicitly in 1927, the location of the action is nebulous: reviewers at the time surmised that it is set in either France or England. One of Haghi’s two major goals is to acquire a copy of a secret agreement between Japan and England, characterized as the most important treaty signed by Japan in a hundred years, but one that would lead to the outbreak of war in the Far East if its existence were made public. The other is to bribe Colonel Jellusic (Fritz Rasp), on the intelligence staff of an unnamed Eastern European country, to provide Haghi with copies of his country’s mobilization plans.

At its premiere in March 1928, it was hard to read politics into the tale (indeed, the story might resonate more in our own age of “non-state actors” posing global threats). Some critics believed that Haghi looked like Lenin, though in a 1967 interview, Lang claimed that he was made up like Trotsky. Rudolf Arnheim opined that sans goatee, Haghi resembled Mussolini, but he turned into Lenin with the addition of a beard and appropriate hairstyling. In the 1967 interview, Lang also claimed that the film was inspired by recent events in London: the Soviet trade organization Arcos (All Russian Co-operative Society) was suspected of being a spy ring, so its offices were raided by Scotland Yard in May 1927. Other historical references noted by critics include the similarity between Colonel Jellusic and the prewar case of the Habsburg officer Colonel Redl: both commit suicide when confronted with their treasonous activities.

None of those hints are really helpful for understanding the story, which plays out as a battle between the intelligence services of several nations against a secret non-state...