The Rosetta Stone of spy movies is Fritz Lang’s Spione

polygon.com:

Circa 1928, the famously bemonocled, infamously dictatorial director (directator?) Fritz Lang hit a rough patch in his career. His classic-to-be Metropolishad nearly bankrupted its parent studio, UFA. Setting out on his own with his own newly formed production company, he envisioned a new release designed to be an odds-on hit, while also leaving room for his pet themes of moral ambiguity and psychological ambivalence. He chose a title that would leave no room for confusion: Spione, released in America under the declarative title Spies.

He had no idea how centrally foundational to spy films that movie would one day become. Spione has had even more impact than other Lang classics like M or Metropolis when it comes to shaping film’s future; it ranks as the second most-influential epic from the man who inspired George Lucas’ visual design for Star Wars. With Spione, Lang gave espionage cinema its Rosetta Stone, a generative masterwork setting the template for the next hundred years, from Alfred Hitchcock thrillers to James Bond.

As technological advances rang in the 1900s, a new world was developing new forms of war. Espionage has existed since the dawn of organized conflict — Sun Tzu emphasized the importance of knowing the enemy in his writing on military theory, and that was somewhere around 400 B.C. — but at the turn of the 20th century, the practice of gathering and weaponizing intelligence rocketed forward. One-off governmental operations and private enterprises like the Pinkertons gave way to the formation of official agencies, with Britain launching its Secret Service Bureau in 1909. Every superpower’s equivalent grew faster, leaner, and smarter, their capabilities expanded by the advent of portable photography for