Spies (1928)

 

The two main characters, Agent No. 326 and Sonja Barranikova, are spies on opposite sides.  326 works for the government of the unnamed country where the film takes place, while Barranikova works for Haghi, a criminal mastermind who is "richer than Ford" and seems to have agents on every other city block and train car.  Haghi sends Barranikova to a hotel where one of 326's associates is staying, ordering her to approach 326 and earn his trust in the hope of getting information from him and eventually taking him out.  But when the two meet, they quickly fall in love after he helps her escape from the police.  The film sets up their connection with a discontinuous insert shot, typical of Fritz Lang's silent filmmaking.  When 326 arrives at his associate's hotel room disguised as a hobo, he leaves a dark hand print on an armchair.  The film cuts directly from the hand print to a shot of Barranikova's hand holding a cigarette and a smoking gun before returning to the hotel room.  There's an intuitive suggestion that they're kindred spirits, both working with their hands and linking up across space.  Barranikova tries to convince Haghi to keep her out of his dealings with 326, but he refuses.  Persisting in his plan, he has her compose a letter to 326, asking to meet him again.  

Despite Haghi's intentions, the ensuing encounter is where the romance properly starts: after Barranikova serves 326 tea, they get totally wrapped up in talking to each other.  The film shows us a series of superimposed images: ticking clocks, shops closing, the evening edition of the newspaper going on sale, and the daylight dims with each succeeding shot.  They talk all afternoon, so enthralled with each other that the rest of the world slips away beneath their notice.

Although Barranikova steadfastly refuses to betray 326 to Haghi, she still doesn't tell him who she really works for.  Also, we never learn 326's real name.  They aren't the only characters with secret identities, either.  Haghi has tiny cameras and microphones hidden in lapels and vases, and people having private indoor meetings will suddenly be shot through the window.  There are mortal dangers hiding not just in every corner, but possibly behind the face of every person we don't know.  

Haghi, however, doesn't live like anyone else.  He spends most of the film behind his desk at his headquarters, location indeterminate, absorbing information from displays in his office and memos that pop out of slots in his desk.  People shuffle in and out of his office, and often leave under some obligation to him.  Everyone else in Spies lives under threats they can't see, but Haghi is unseen and sees everything.  Despite Barranikova's moral compass, it's not a shock that she starts out on his side.  We learn she became a spy after her family was killed by the Tsarist Okhrana.  She would know about constant, uncertain dangers, and Haghi at least promises certainty where no one else can.  This, plus his role as the backbone and driver of the film, led Jonathan Rosenbaum to suggest that Haghi was a stand-in for the filmmaker.  He might also be a stand-in for telecommunications in general, suggesting that, even as they connect the world together, they also make us more vulnerable to exposure and manipulation.

Then there's Dr. Matsumoto, attempting to execute a treaty between Japan and Great Britain.  Haghi wants to stop it.  What happens to Dr. Matsumoto is sort of a flip side to what happens to 326.  Haghi sends another of his spies undercover to earn Matsumoto's confidence, but unlike Barranikova, she does exactly as Haghi wants, from start to finish.  The parallel between Matsumoto and 326 highlights just how lucky 326 was.  Had anyone but Barranikova been sent after him, his display of character that won her over could just as easily have led to his demise.

The contrast between the different characters' lives, in context of secret battles of wits involving double agents, telecommunications, and the bustle of city life, creates not only suspense and paranoia, but also romance, tragedy, and reflection on contingency.  The emotional effect is somewhat like that of the many missed connections in Jacques Demy's The Young Girls of Rochefort, a drastically different film from Spies.  It reminds us of the lives we hope to live, then reminds us how we might miss opportunities to have them. 

Lang knows that the very act of putting something to the screen goes a long way toward making it significant and believable.  Many of his characters are image-makers who are in it partly for the thrill of seeing their creations come to life.  At the end of the film Haghi is revealed to be, above all else, an ace performer.  He's played by Rudolf Klein-Rogge, the same actor as the inventor Rotwang from Metropolis, who falls desperately in love with the performance put on by a robot he built to deceive the cityfolk.  

But there's a little too much at stake in his films to be satisfied with just performance.  In Lang's 1937 film You Only Live Once, Henry Fonda's character is released from prison, then re-imprisoned for a bank robbery.  He insists on his innocence, but the film leaves us in doubt for some time: we only see the bank robbery perpetrated by a masked man, followed by Fonda's arrest.  When we see the robbery, the perpetrator tosses bombs at the bank that fill the frame with smoke.  Later, when Fonda gets into a heated confrontation with the prison chaplain and guards over what really happened, the screen is covered with a thick fog.  Like 326 and Barranikova first being connected by images of their hands, these scenes of chaotically obscured truth are connected by haze. 

The inability to trust their surroundings or the people they encounter doesn't mean the characters don't form attachments.  The image-makers and their victims alike experience some sense that there must be a deeper reality, and a longing to be in touch with it.  They desire both the sensuousness of the images and for the connection between performer and audience to be more than just some trick.  In several of his films, people are crushed by their own guilt. In his silent films, guilt often manifests as ghastly apparitions.  Matsumoto is haunted by three agents whose lives he wasted.  Barranikova repeatedly hallucinates the number of a train 326 is on when she fears Haghi will attack it.  Freder in Metropolis has a similar experience when confronted with the injustice at the core of his father's city.  Curiously, even the pure-evil title character of Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, another character played by Klein-Rogge, is accosted by images of his own demons.  Even in the perspectives of characters who have no affection or respect for anyone else, there is something more to the reality of other people than just their put-on identities or susceptibility to being pawns of someone else.