A Foreign Affair (1948)

A dazzling movie,standing with Billy Wilder's very best, and surely it has Marlene Dietrich's finest performance. Berlin, l946...bitter...witty...haunting story, interesting characters, evocative stuff.

You can go back and back to savor this one.The talk is terrific, and the urgency of feeling, and the sharp comedy and underlying drama are pure gold. Dietrich's songs, "In the Ruins of Berlin," and "Black Market" ,show a Great Star doing her superb stuff.

Fmovies: For the two decades after World War II, there was a popular fascination involving films about or made in a reconstructed Europe. From The Search to The Great Escape, a genuine sense of authenticity maintained, sustained by writers, actors, and directors who had actually lived through the epoch. Most of them are now gone, not the least of which was one of the finest directors ever: Billy Wilder.

In this film, there are few stock caricatures once the viewer is able to get past certain allusions to contemporary popular culture (e.g. Who now remembers who "Gabriel Heatter" was?). Even the line "Is it subversive to kiss a Republican?" has a fresh ring to it. The writers must have been pleased with Wilder's usual fast-paced and witty visual turns accentuating their remarkable script.

Of course there is Marlene Dietrich the icon in effect playing herself as a postwar blue angel, and real Germans speaking real German where the story demanded it. Jean Arthur provides an able if somewhat overdrawn foil for La Dietrich, and has a little fun at it. In one scene, she coyly admits her first name is "Phoebe," which happens to be the name of a character she played years earlier in a western called Arizona (1940).

Wilder would revisit Berlin again in 1961 for the hilarious send-up One, Two, Three -- still a great favorite and indeed a classic film.

Though the plot of A Foreign Affair is lightweight and has seen service in many other movies (wholesome woman and sexy woman pursuing the same man; man pretends to fall for woman and then really does), the backdrop is deadly serious, compelling, and unusual. We are in the American Zone of Berlin after the war, a sector that, with the British and French zones, would soon become West Berlin, a magnet for many who would struggle to escape to this tiny outpost of the West in what would become Communist East Germany, many of them dying in the attempt. The Berlin Wall would be built to separate West from East Berlin. The Germans in the movie have had their world destroyed, don't know what is going on in the present, and can only wait with helpless terror for the future.

Though we are shown houses pulverised by Allied bombing and people living amongst the ruins, there is a lighthearted aspect to it all--the usual wartime stuff of GI's trading chocolate or stockings for kisses from pretty girls. In reality, however, it was more likely that they would be traded for sex from women desperate to feed themselves and their children, by soldiers reveling in a power they never had in civilian life and oblivious to the disgust and humiliation of the women. Marlene Dietrich says that, when the Russian troops invaded Berlin, "it was hard for the women." That's the understatement of the century! The Russians raped, and gang-raped, any women they could find--women died from being literally raped to death. It is understandable that Billy Wilder did not want to make the milieu too bleak in order to dampen the comedy, but keep in mind that matters were far more brutal and squalid than portrayed here.

It is a rather dark joke that Dietrich is cast in the role of a German woman who has had Nazi lovers and still feels loyal to Hitler. In fact, Dietrich became an American citizen in 1939 and extensively toured US military bases, sometimes at great danger, to entertain the troops. This aroused rage in Germany, and even decades after the war, as the result of protests by locals who called her a traitor, the government backed down and did not name a street in her honour. Can you beat that! An amusing footnote: When Dietrich tries her wiles on an officer, he says, Don't be silly, I've just become a grandfather. I don't know whether this was coincidence or intentional, but at the time the movie was made, Dietrich became a grandmother--an event that gave her a label that was very popular, but which she hated, "world's most glamorous grandmother."

A Foreign Affair fmovies. Although A Foreign Affair turned out to be a big success for all involved, biographies of Billy Wilder, Jean Arthur, and Marlene Dietrich all talk about the difficulties they had in this film. Especially Wilder and Arthur.

Paramount put up some big bucks for this film, even including sending Billy Wilder and a second unit team to film the surviving city of Berlin from World War II. It all paid off quite nicely and you can bet the footage found it's way into films not half as good. It looks far better than the standard newsreel films that are often used as background for foreign locations.

Marlene Dietrich plays the girlfriend of former Nazi bigwig Peter Von Zerneck who is presumed dead by the public at large, but the army knows is very much alive. How to smoke him out is the problem that Colonel Millard Mitchell of the occupying forces has. He decides to use the growing relationship that Captain John Lund has with Dietrich as Von Zerneck is the jealous type.

But into the picture comes Jean Arthur, part of a group of visiting members of Congress touring occupied Berlin. Arthur departs from the group and starts conducting her own investigations and in the way Joseph Cotten was doing in occupied Vienna in The Third Man blundering his way into an investigation in the British sector there, Arthur threatens to blow up all of Mitchell's plans. Especially since Lund is starting to switch gears and drop Marlene for Jean.

Dietrich comes out best in this film. Not only was she German, but she was born and grew up in Berlin. Marlene may have invested more of herself in her character of Erika Von Schluetow than in any other film she did. She gets three great original songs by Frederick Hollander, Black Market, Illusions, and The Ruins Of Berlin that speak not to just her character, but to the sullen character of a beaten people. By the way that's composer Hollander himself accompanying her at the piano.

Dietrich and Wilder got along just great, both being refugees from Nazism. They got along so good that Arthur felt she was being frozen out and Wilder was favoring Dietrich.

Both Frank Capra and Cecil B. DeMille spoke of the difficulties in working with Jean Arthur and Billy Wilder also echoes what his colleagues said in their memoirs. Arthur was a terribly insecure person and it took a lot of patience to work with her. The results were usually worth it to the movie going public, but for her fellow workers on the film it could be painful. A Foreign Affair may have been good training for Wilder when he later had to get performances out of another diva, Marilyn Monroe.

Wilder came in for a lot of criticism showing our occupying forces in a less than perfect light and also making fun of a member of Congress and a Republican at that as Jean was in the film, most definitely not in real life. Millard Mitchell's a smart and tough professional soldier, but he's a bit of fathead as well as extols the virtue of teaching German youth baseball as a method of deNazification. As if it were that simple. But A Foreign Affair has held up very well over 60 years now and is Billy Wilder at some of his satirical and cynical best.

Billy, just how did you do it?

This is a superb film on post-war Germany, and an amazing take on Berlin in the late 40s. Wilder combines his poetical eye for the comic with a very subtle analysis of morality. And, on top of that, Marlene Dietrich sings and sums it all up. This film is a classic, make no mistake about that, and you definitely want to see it. Plus, it's history.

Billy Wilder had a special relationship with Berlin, and, to be sure, with Germany, and his movies show how deep this understanding ran: "One,Two, Three" and "A Foreign Affair" are among the best films made on Berlin. Full stop.

This is a well written (Brackett and Breen) and directed (Billy Wilder) film with great performances. Marlene Dietrich is impressive as the Nazi chanteuse with loose morals, great legs and an eye for the main chance. Her songs e.g. Ruins of Berlin are sardonic and compelling. Jean Arthur is irresistible as the frustrated Congresswoman, throwing herself at John Lund with enthusiasm and gradually coming to see human behaviour in shades of grey, rather than black and white.

John Lund is very good as the cynical army officer, attracted to Dietrich while repelled by her politics and prepared to romance Arthur in order to bury Dietrich's Nazi past. He has a nice way with underplayed humour e.g. "It can't be subversive to kiss a Republican!" Supporting actors, especially Millard Mitchell as Col Plummer are all good.

Berlin makes a bleak impressive backdrop, making the behaviour of the occupying troops and the Berliners easy to understand. There are some lovely vignettes e.g. the German woman pushing a pram decorated with the US flag.

Unfortunately the film was perceived as unpatriotic by many critics and did not do as much for the career of John Lund as it should.