Spione (Spies) (review)

Motifs of spying and surveillance are a staple ingredient of the crime serial, yet in Lang's early technothrillers – a genre closely related to sf – they often carry additional figurative meanings surrounding the implications of seeing and knowing, as well as not seeing and not knowing, in the visually dominated culture of the early twentieth century, particularly in the modern city.² In Spione, bank manager Haghi (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) is also the boss of an extensive spy network whose criminal activities attract the attention of the British secret service. Donald Tremaine (Willy Fritsch), a young secret agent known as 'number 326', is given the task of catching the master spy. In the course of his investigation, he and Sonja (Gerda Maurus), a Russian spy in Haghi's service, fall in love. When Haghi realises this, he plots an elaborate train crash to kill 326, but 326 survives and with Sonja's help destroys the spy network.

At the start of the film Haghi's agents are everywhere and nearly always one step ahead of the secret service represented by Inspector Jason (Craighall Sherry) and his men, many of whom have already become Haghi's victims. Early on in the film, agent 326 is given the task of finding out who is behind the theft of a commercial treaty when he overpowers Jason's private secretary as he covertly tries to take a photo of 326 with a miniature camera. Yet a cut to Haghi's office reveals that he is already in the possession of photos of 326 as well as the man's fingerprints taken unbeknownst to both Tremaine and, crucially, the audience. Our belated recognition that a tramp picking up 326's disposed cigarette butt had in fact been one of Haghi's surveillance officers in disguise conveys a sense of Haghi's all-seeing presence and the quasi-omnipotent influence he yields as a result.

These interrelated themes of knowledge and power through seeing and surveillance (and vice versa) played a major part in many of the forty films Lang made, not only in Weimar Germany between 1919 and 1932 but also in Hollywood after 1935, and in West Germany for a brief period in the late 1950s. Lio Shah's (Ressel Orla) 'Spiders' gang in Lang's Die Spinnen (Spiders; Germany 1919–20) can be regarded as the earliest example of the many diverse secret organisations of his films to come: operating within the state, menacing its citizens and tearing holes into the apparatus ostensibly there to protect society from crime and alien powers that be.

In discussions of Lang's Weimar films, Spione is examined mostly in relation to the three parts of the Dr Mabuse series (Germany 1922 and 1932), even though structurally Spione is arguably related more closely to M (Germany 1931) (see Patalas 98) in its vision of moles on every street corner, spies infiltrating even the highest office, the city in the grip of an invisible force. Whether they are keeping an eye on the government's own not so secret agents in – Spione, or hunting down a child murderer in M, both organisations are headed by criminals disguised as gentlemen: Haghi and Schränker (Gustaf Gründgens) are both murderers and it seems to matter little that one organisation employs beggars, the other bankers, to do the (undercover) work for the bosses. Espionage and underground organisations also feature heavily in Lang's war films: in Hangmen also Die (US 1942), a group of anti-Nazi saboteurs fight both against the German occupation of their country and collaborators in their own ranks; in Ministry of Fear (US 1944), a supposed Nazi spy turns out to be a police inspector (Percy Waram), and the real Nazi spy (Carl Esmond) is a friendly chap called Willi Hilfe ('Willy Help') who is only brought down in the final shot (literally and figuratively) of the movie. The last film Lang made, Die Tausend Augen des Dr Mabuse (The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse; West Germany 1960), features...