Spy Games and Stiff Collars: In the Employ of the Secret Service

Is this thing worth your time?

Honestly, only if you have a very specific itch for black-and-white WWI spy stuff. If you like your pacing snappy and your dialogue natural, you are going to hate this. It is slow, it is theatrical, and it feels like it was filmed in a library.

But if you are a fan of old-school German cinema or just love watching people in crisp uniforms stare intensely at maps while smoking, you might find something here to like. It is definitely not for the casual Netflix scroller.

The vibe

The whole thing feels like it is being held together by stiff collars and even stiffer performances. There is a scene where a character delivers a piece of crucial intel, and it takes them roughly three minutes to walk across the room and say the line. It is almost funny how much gravity they are trying to inject into a basic military update.

Brigitte Helm is in this, which is always a treat, even when the movie is doing its best to hide her light behind a pile of files and period-appropriate angst. She just has that look, you know? Like she knows exactly how the scene ends, but she is waiting for everyone else to catch up.

Odd little moments

• The way they handle the “secret” plans—it looks like they are passing around a grocery list, not the fate of the Russian front.
• The background extras in the command center scenes seem to have been told to just walk in circles until someone yelled stop. It is distracting once you notice it.
• The lighting in the final act gets surprisingly moody for a film that feels so rigid otherwise.

It reminds me a bit of On the Fighting Line in how it treats war like a chess match played by men who have never seen mud. There is no grit here. Just a lot of desks and stern looks.

Is it better than Seine Hoheit, der Eintänzer? That is a tough call. They are playing different games, really. One is for laughs, one is for drama, but they both share that weirdly artificial feeling of a studio stage.

I found myself zoning out during the long, wordy meetings, only to be jolted back by some sudden, sharp gesture. It is a movie of peaks and valleys, mostly valleys, with a few interesting peaks of high-contrast photography. Not a masterpiece, but it exists, and that is sometimes enough.