Welcome to Public Domain Theater, your home for the wonderful world of films that have (in the United States, at least) fallen into the public domain, and are free for everyone to see!

This time, we return to the oeuvre of Fritz Lang with the 1928 film Spione (or, translated from the German, Spies). As you may have guessed from the title, this is a spy movie, focused on a government agent’s efforts to root out an impossibly vast and intricate network of enemy spies led by a diabolical genius. There are love affairs, betrayals, deceptions within deceptions, and plenty of beautifully constructed scenes from an acknowledged master of the craft. It’s a lengthy two and a half hours, but not one bit of it is dull.

Maybe you don’t have those two and half hours to spare, though. No worries! We’ve also got a five-minute cartoon from the Private Snafu series, “Censored” – and to keep on theme with Spione, it’s also about the struggle to protect government secrets.

See, the Private Snafu cartoons were created to be educational shorts shown to American military recruits during World War II, meant to instruct them on many of the basics of life in the service – such as the need for military secrets to be censored out of letters home. However, these cartoons were made by the same folks who did the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts, so it’s no surprise that Private Snafu’s efforts to get a letter past the censors turns into a bunch of zany slapstick that, more than anything, resembles Ralph Wolf trying to sneak past Sam Sheepdog.

Content warning: this cartoon contains racist depictions of Japanese people, as well as … partial nudity!?!

Yep, ironically for a cartoon about censorship, the fact that it was made for the War Department and not the general public means it didn’t have to worry about ordinary censorship rules. Taking this rare opportunity, the animators decided, hey! Let’s throw some half-naked women in there!

If either of these films sounds like your jam, then have a blast here at Public Domain Theater … and unlike government secrets, feel free to share these with your friends!

Opening Cartoon:

Feature Presentation: