SimonJack
"A Foreign Affair," has a first-rate cast, all of whom deliver superb roles. Marlene Dietrich plays her familiar role of a sultry siren, as Erika von Schluetow. She sings three songs in the cabaret in which she works. She had been a registered Nazi since 1935. (In real life, she had fled Nazi Germany and later entertained Allied forces during the war.) Jean Arthur is superb in a much more complex role that mixes seriousness, stuffiness and shock, with humor, giddiness and hurt. She is Phoebe Frost, a member of a U.S. congressional committee going to Berlin "to investigate the morale of American occupation troops – nothing else." John Lund is Capt. John Pringle, a three-year World War II combat veteran who has stayed to serve in the clean-up of Germany. Millard Mitchell is Col. Rufus Plummer who seems to be in charge of Berlin's recovery. Some lesser characters all do very well in their roles. The movie was filmed mostly in Berlin in 1947. It is a bittersweet mixture of comedy, romance and drama, with a realistic look at the after effects of war. The scenes of a ravished city – from the air, and up close on the ground, give this film substantial historical value. It has an interesting plot, crisp and clear screenplay, and all the trappings of an excellent movie. I give it 10 stars. This is one of the best post-war films that show the destruction of Germany. More than 75,000 tons of explosives were dropped on Berlin by British and American forces. Austrian-born Billy Wilder helped write the screenplay and directed this film. Wilder got his film start in Berlin. He fled after the rise of the Nazi Party in 1933 and landed in Hollywood in 1934. There is some interesting background to this movie, but various online resources have some discrepancies. Apparently, Wilder served in the U.S. Army in post- war Germany. The U.S. wanted him to make a movie about the Allies and occupied Germany. That led to "A Foreign Affair."Wilder interviewed many GIs and Germans in Berlin. He met a woman clearing rubble from the streets. She said she was "grateful the Allies had come to fix the gas." Wilder thought it was so she could have a hot meal, "but she said it was so she could commit suicide." Wilder worked that into the movie. Col. Plummer, on the Berlin tour, tells the congressional committee about "the first day the gas works started operating again. There were 160 suicides in Berlin alone. That was 10 months ago. Today they take a match and light the gas and boil themselves some potatoes, but not many potatoes, mind you. There's still a lot of hunger. But there is a new will to live." The dialog also packs a lot of information about the post-war work of the Army. Plummer tells the committee about the repair of hospitals; handling four million displaced persons, most with no homes to return to; building schools and finding teachers and teaching them; restoring utilities and public services; helping the Germans set up a free press and parliamentary government. The movie has humorous and serious cynicism. Phoebe says to her male cohorts on the plane, "12,000 of our boys are policing that pest hole down there, and according to our reports they are being infected by a kind of moral malaria. It is our duty to their wives, their mothers, their sisters to find the facts. And, if the reports are true, to fumigate that place with all the insecticide at our disposal."The ground tour stops to watch a bunch of boys playing baseball. Plummer says, "these kids were old men" when the Allies got to Berlin. "We're trying to make kids out of them again. Trying to kick the goosestep out of them and cure them of blind obedience, and teach them …" Later, they drive by the site of Hitler's underground bunker, and Plummer says, "where he married Eva Braun and where they killed themselves. A lot of people say it was a perfect honeymoon." John and Phoebe are looking for von Schluetow's file at night. John flips through the files and reads the names aloud, ""Schlaga, Schlagenbury, Schlagenspitz, Schlitz … maybe some of them never got to Milwaukie." Phoebe has the same look of consternation on her face and didn't get the joke. (The Schlitz brewing company of Milwaukie was a major beer brand in the U.S. at the time.)Serving in the U.S. Army during the Cold War, I flew into Berlin's Templehof Airport on a mail plane in 1963. I visited the sites shown in this film that were then in East Germany (the Russian zone at the time of this film). The Russians wasted no time in building the war memorial to their soldiers killed in the Battle of Berlin. It didn't open until May 1949, so in this movie scene it was under construction. Here are some of my favorite lines from this film. Erika, ""For 15 years we haven't slept in Germany. First it was Hitler screaming on the radio. Then the war … all the bombing." Phoebe: "Are there any other sewers like this one?" John, "Oh, three or four maybe, but this is the best sewer."(John kisses Phoebe in the file room.) Phoebe, "Captain Pringle, no!" John, "Why not? You're not a Nazi. Don't tell me it's subversive to kiss a Republican." Phoebe, "I'm a congresswoman." John, "Yeah. Now I know how I'll cast my absentee ballot come the election."Phoebe, "When did you learn so much about women's clothes?" John, "My mother wore women's clothes." Erika to Phoebe after they are released from a police raid, "Let's go up to my apartment. It's only a few ruins from here."
vincentlynch-moonoi
I have a different view of this film because of the performance of Jean Arthur. In my view, she was ill suited to this role. We typically want to like Jean Arthur, but in this film she is dour to a fault...almost totally unlikable and unsympathetic. But that is one of the few faults of this film. Billy Wilder -- other than the Arthur aspect -- put together a film with snappy dialog and mostly very good performances. Marlene Dietirch, who may have been a tad too old for her part (or was John Lund too young for his part?), put in a fine performance. Lund was good...never quite sure why he wasn't a bigger star. But what takes center stage in this film are the views of post-war Berlin (much of the movie was filmed on location). I had seen footage of the devastation before, but this film showed far more than I had ever seen, and I frankly was not aware the city was this far gone after the war. The print that I viewed on TCM had some distinct problems with the cinematography -- jolting blurring during certain movements, particularly when panning -- but it is not clear to me if the fault was in the original film or due to deterioration, but it was quite distracting. A good but flawed film.
bkoganbing
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.
