Spies
(Spione)

Live Musical Accompaniment
Screening on Film
Recently Restored

Directed by Fritz Lang.
With Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Gerda Maurus, Willy Fritsch.
Germany , 1928, 35mm, black & white, silent, 175 min.

For decades Spies circulated in an all-but-incoherent 88-minute print. The HFA proudly presents the nearly three-hour restored version of this Lang classic. Mabuse actor Rudolf Klein-Rogge stars as Haghi, a criminal mastermind who poses as the respectable, wheelchair-bound president of a bank. Lang’s characters move through the abstract geometry of an impersonal postwar city that is a stunning reflection of urban life in the crisis-ridden Weimar Republic. Modern means of transportation and communication become tools of instrumental rationality in Haghi’s sinister schemes. Spies is a real discovery: dynamic, spellbinding, and galvanizing, the German Lang at the top of his form.