Spymaster Lang: The Legacy of Spione

THE MASTERMIND IS PLAYING cat’s cradle with a string of pearls and the beautiful spy crosses her legs, just as the diplomat (in another part of the city) is completing his ritual suicide. Soon the sliding panels in the wall will open, the mastermind will roll forward in his wheelchair, the express train will begin its fatal journey into the tunnel, the dance band will strike up its last tune before disaster strikes, the clown will prepare to blow his brains out. It’s the same movie again—Fritz Lang’s Spies—and it feels as if I’ve been watching it all my life, a prolonged viewing occasionally interrupted by bouts of exposure to the external world.

No matter which episode is up, I’m at home, a familiarity that may have something to do with Spies having served as matrix for at least half the movies ever made. Around each of Lang’s meticulous images hover the wispy presences of movies yet unmade: there’s the bullet-in-the-book motif from The Thirty-Nine Steps, there are the gangsters in gas masks from Armored Car Robbery, there’s Shanghai Lily, there’s Mysterious Dr. Satan, there’s James Bond’s comically irascible supervisor M, all of them traveling the network of corridors and rails and superhighways that stretches from Alphaville to Gotham City. Indeed, you could imaginably take Spies, colorize it, dub in a dialogue track, add suitably cheesy synthesizer music, and sell it direct to cable as Terror Agents or something of the sort, perfectly at ease in a future it more or less invented.

The inexorable rhythm of the opening montage retains its power to hook the eye into a chain of images. Made in 1927, Spies was Lang’s first independent production, and in this stunning prelude he allows himself a bravura flourish to demonstrate his mastery. An intertitle flashes: “The same sort of thing was happening all over the world.” Hands open a safe. Hands slide a sealed document into a plain envelope. A goggled motorcycle driver drives madly away. Radio waves emanate from gigantic pylons. A headline flashes news of a theft. A diplomat riding in the back of a car is shot from a passing car; as he collapses, his briefcase is deftly lifted by the assassin. Bureaucrats surrounded by disorderly heaps of documents shout desperately into telephones. A uniformed agent strides into headquarters, salutes his superior, starts to speak: “I KNOW WHO—” A bullet pierces the window; the agent falls dead to the floor. His interlocutor looks toward the camera in horror: “My God, what can be the power behind all this?” Close-up of a bearded man with hypnotic eyes, his face wreathed in cigarette smoke: I! It’s a perfect demonstration of what movies do so dangerously well: create an inexorable visual logic out of images devoid of context or ultimate cause. You don’t need to be told how or why the man with the cigarette brought about these disasters, since you already believe it.

It takes about three minutes; if the movie stopped there it would feel complete. Video makes it possible to prolong those three minutes voluptuously, to meditate more calmly on indelible images projected only for a fraction of a second. That spy on the motorcycle, for instance: an incredible shot that resonates disturbance, perhaps because of the rider’s fixed demonic grin, perhaps because it is shot from under the wheels of the escaping vehicle (it was created, according to Lotte Eisner, by suspending the motorcycle in midair and creating clouds of dust with a wind machine). Or that animated image of radio towers with shimmering coils of sound radiating from them, sleek monoliths of modern communication carrying the same mythic charge as the Tower of Babel in Metropolis: impossible not to admire a filmmaker who can afford to toss away such an effect.

With that first glimpse of Rudolf Klein-Rogge (Dr. Mabuse himself) as Haghi, master criminal, international banker, and probable Soviet agent—Haghi with his gleaming skull and neatly trimmed beard, his stylishly tailored jacket and dark turtleneck, who according to Lang was supposed to look like Trotsky but who looks a good deal more like Lenin—we have been brought right to the heart of the movie. It doesn’t get any deeper. Once we’ve seen him, chain-smoking in his wheelchair, attended by his tough unsmiling nurse, manipulating the world from behind his desk, we’ve gone as far as this particular system of signs can take us. The rest is elaboration and complication swirling around that empty and alluring mask. He is the unmoving source of all intrigue, a totem to which the intrigue continually recurs in order to renew itself.

As for what it might all be about, the banality of the first intertitle—“The same sort of thing was happening all over the world”—encapsulates the spy genre’s banal essence: the conviction that apparently random and wide-spread acts of disruption form a pattern and are centrally directed, an ever-popular doctrine that appears to flourish with renewed vigor as Lang’s century approaches its end.

As always with Lang, each shot insists on being a separate compartment, a space with distinct coordinates and laws; a series of such shots could be strung together in almost any order to form an outwardly coherent narrative. The American release print of Spies is less than half as long (eighty-eight minutes) as the nearly three-hour German original (recently reconstructed by the Munich Film Archive); it sloughs off a major subplot, based on the incident that is also the subject of István Szabó’s Colonel Redl, and also pares away any number of striking and clarifying details, such as the snapshot, brandished for purposes of blackmail, of a society woman lounging in an opium den; it reverses the order of scenes and uses one important sequence to convey an entirely different plot point; yet in all major respects it’s the same movie. If there were a lost six-hour version kicking around somewhere, that too would undoubtedly be the same movie, only with more branches, more street scenes to place under surveillance, more locked premises to be entered covertly, more seductive or intimidating glances to be launched.

PARANOIA IS THE CLASSICISM of the twentieth century. The conspiratorial traps shut with a rationality that lends the world a semblance of order and balance. Within its welter of apparently bewildering surfaces—systematic malevolence, secret surveillance, betrayal, masquerade, infiltration—the melodrama of espionage offers the paradoxical reassurance that all things really are interconnected. The details converge on a central and symmetrical anxiety with streamlined serenity of form. More terrifying than any conspiracy theory would be the absence of conspiracy. The alternative is vacancy and drift: the paranoid patriots of America, for instance, find it preferable to believe that black helicopters are being sent to control them rather than confront the government’s actual indifference to their fate.

Spies soothes like music. The spy genre it virtually inaugurates has remained a primary vehicle for transmuting the most unsettling of emotions—dread of entrapment, suspicion of appearances, universal mistrust—into an orderly, not to say mechanical, exhilaration. Chaos is repackaged as quadrille. However much Spies may purport to be about anxiety and social disturbance, its pleasures are those of equipoise and sharp focus and crisp action, and its suicidal finale is neatly capped by the descent of a music-hall curtain, like the punch line of a joke.

What indeed do spies do but play tricks on people? Their activities constitute little more than a more sophisticated variant on the tricks that the earliest movies loved to demonstrate, like the boy stepping on the garden hose in L’Arroseur arrosé, the diabolical substitutions and transformations in the films of Georges Méliès, the pranks of Louis Feuillade’s mischievous street urchin Bout-de-Zan. Spy movies—like their cousins the wartime commando movie and the caper movie—are elaborately engineered practical jokes, ranging in complexity from the almost ineffably abstract scams of Le Carré’s people to the explosive gimmickry of 007’s arsenal.

It’s a peculiar genre, capable of carrying its pleasures to unusually attenuated and cerebral limits. In musicals people sing and dance; in Westerns they ride horses and shoot six-guns; in spy movies they conduct discussions in offices, examine pieces of paper, sit immobile in nightclubs in order to study the faces of other patrons, go for long walks or drives through city streets, go regularly in and out of buildings like some species of municipal inspector: like the urban bureaucrats they are or pretend to be.

Instead of chasing outlaws through the canyon, the spies chase misfiled documents, improperly issued authorizations, glitches in accounting procedure. “Information was the thing for which they fought,” announces an intertitle in Spies, and the movie’s climactic revelation stems from a pedantic clerk’s noticing a discrepancy in a financial statement. Spy stories are a century-long graphing of our psychic relation to an ineluctable bureaucracy conceived alternately as protector and oppressor, invader and home team. Bureaucracy is everywhere and nowhere; like the Chinese poet trying to describe the mountain, we can hardly conceptualize it because we’re inside it.

In Spies Lang constructs a model kit of modernity, complete with rail systems and bank vaults and wired for communication in all its rooms. To the newspapers, the radios, the telegrams sent “via Transradio,” the ingenious spies add their tiny secret cameras, duplicate keys, disappearing ink, microphones hidden in vases, carbon paper hidden under blotting pads in post offices, and the marvelous teleprompter-like device built into the wall that keeps Haghi abreast of every fresh development.

Above all there is paper, still central in this world: notes, slips, clippings. Disasters (like the wreck of car 33133) begin as marks on paper. In a toy world defined by an interlocking system of delivery routes, the secret pirates make it their business to divert things from their proper destination: messages, treaties, trains, even a murderer en route to his execution. The game is to intercept the interceptors: when contact is made, explosive devices go off.

None of it is in any more danger of running out of control than an electric train. Within this loop we are at leisure to contemplate, ecstatically, the internal rhymes of pulp fantasy, the multiple resonances and replications from a century of mirror images: the rhymes of Haghi with Mabuse and Dr. No, of Gerda Maurus’s exotic spy Sonia with Dietrich’s Agent x–27 in Dishonored, of Willy Fritsch’s resourceful hero with James Bond and Matt Helm, of the lethal gas in Haghi’s bank vault with the psychedelic gas sprayed in Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik, of the death of the clown Nemo at the circus with the death of Mr. Memory at the music hall in The Thirty-Nine Steps.

It slides by again, a flurry of beautiful old postcards: Fritz Rasp as the traitorous Russian colonel with his extravagant mustache and his cigarette holder, Lien Dyers curled up in her kimono as she prepares to seduce the Japanese ambassador, black limousines hurtling along country roads. The images were already old. Lang saw to it that nothing was left out—dramatic tableaux from Louis Feuillade serials, moments of high tension frozen on the covers of paperback thrillers by Edgar Wallace or E. Phillips Oppenheim, posters of actresses dressed up as exotic adventuresses—all the ingredients for a universe of pleasurable expectations.

Shuffled among the cards are the faded real-world ingredients that can almost masquerade as nostalgia, the barely disguised portraits of Colonel Redl and Zinoviev and Mata Hari, lifelike snapshots of assassination and public disorder in the streets of Europe, the trucks of the riot police and the jackboots of Haghi’s private corps of security guards. No way to avoid the more troubling rhymes of pulp fantasy with its double: the world beyond the walls of the crystal dollhouse, the zone scarred and burned repeatedly through the efforts of agents seemingly steeped, precisely, in the clichés of pulp fantasy. So that by now the collapsing walls of Haghi’s Götterdämmerung inevitably evoke the collapse of the federal building in Oklahoma City (whose accused perpetrator had previously rented Blown Away), and the poison gas triggered by Haghi’s last command is redolent of the actual nerve gas manufactured by Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo cult, whose leader Asahara could have been played convincingly by Rudolf Klein-Rogge (himself, to complete the rhyme scheme, an ardent Nazi—and the former husband of Thea von Harbou, subsequently Frau Lang, who wrote the novel on which Spies is based).

We are not going to be left undisturbed any more than the Berlin audience of 1928. Our pleasure in the movie’s delirious unreality is going to be interrupted by someone for whom its premises are altogether believable. If not Asahara or Mark from Michigan, then Pol Pot or Chairman Gonzalo of the Shining Path: Haghis upon Haghis, creatures of tailoring and cigarette smoke. And so, between the frames, I catch glimpses of other episodes—scenes from the other movie, the external one—that could slot effortlessly into Lang’s scheme. As I pass through East Berlin by train some years before the fall, my passport is examined with grim thoroughness by a blond young border cop who might have been one of Haghi’s perfectly accoutred thugs. On every wall of every street radiating from the center of a Third World capital, The Leader stares out from identical posters. Standing in front of the World Trade Center in 1993, I watch the crushed hulks of sports cars being carted away from the bombed-out parking garage like detritus from the wreck of Train 33133. Along Second Avenue, silent and unannounced on a midwinter evening, phalanxes of police cars and ambulances carry out a dry run for apocalyptic disaster, quite as if they were making a movie: assembling, perhaps, for yet another retake of the last reel of Spies.

Film Comment, July–August 1995