From the Munich Film Archives comes this splendid restoration of Fritz Lang's epic thriller, circulated for decades at 88 minutes, restored to nearly three hours. Rudolf Klein-Rogge stars as the master criminal Haghi, who besides being a spy is also the president of a bank and, in his spare time, a music hall clown. Shades of Feuillade! Lang's editing virtuosity is in evidence from the very start, and through it he reveals that evil, like filmmaking, is an art: "The structure of the film is flawless. Lang reveals the methods of the spies with meticulous care...spiced with touches of humor" (Prof. Bertand Augst). "The characters in Spies often move through almost abstract or geometric compositions.... Lang's film takes place in an unknown city, but it is obviously an image of the troubled world of Weimar Germany. At the same time, Spies is also a forerunner of Hitchcock's dense English thrillers and the guilt-ridden espionage of Graham Greene and Eric Ambler novels. Granddaddy of decades of intrigue epics, Spies, in its rigorous austerity, remains the most modern of the bunch." (Elliott Stein, Village Voice)