Critics reviews

A 2004 Murnau Stiftung restoration of the complete version was a revelation, not only for its more complete narrative but for its superb visual quality. It’s a feast of shots that only Lang could have composed.

The malevolent artist's line between puppet-master and clown is drawn in the brilliantly excoriating finale, skewering the sensation-hungry Weimar zeitgeist in an acrid coup de théâtre that leaves only a pierced cranium and thunderous applause.

In Spies's final stretch, the cat-and-mouse chase is flip-flopped, with Haghi retreating into various guises to circumvent his indictment. The last of these disguises, and the one that sends the film off on a richly uncanny note, is that of a clown. That Lang imagines the all-seeing artist as both an oppressor and a fool leaves Spies with a final, lingering complexity that can't help but feel like the riddle through which to contemplate the filmmaker's ensuing body of work.

The challenge, when writing about Spione, is to honour both its formal brilliance and its heightened picture of a social realm (a realm in which, as Jonathan Rosenbaum has proposed, the ‘machinations of an incoherent, malevolent universe' are locked ‘precisely into position') (7) – in other words, both its modernism and its modernity – without losing sight of its status as popular art.

Spione is easily the most erotic of Lang's German films, and perhaps the only one (discounting a few mad moments in Metropolis) that borders on the pornographic.