Dans Berlin occupée, un capitaine de l'armée est déchiré entre une chanteuse de cabaret au passé nazi et une femme membre du Congrès américain qui enquête sur celle-ci.Dans Berlin occupée, un capitaine de l'armée est déchiré entre une chanteuse de cabaret au passé nazi et une femme membre du Congrès américain qui enquête sur celle-ci.Dans Berlin occupée, un capitaine de l'armée est déchiré entre une chanteuse de cabaret au passé nazi et une femme membre du Congrès américain qui enquête sur celle-ci.
- Nommé pour 2 oscars
- 2 victoires et 3 nominations au total
- Joe
- (as Bill Murphy)
- Lt. Hornby
- (as James Larmore)
- Lieutenant Lee Thompson
- (as William Neff)
- General Finney
- (as George Carleton)
Avis en vedette
It stars Marlene Dietrich (one of her all-time best performances), and amazing Jean Arthur (in one of her final films), and newcomer John Lund, who was rather wooden in later performances...here, he's terrific.
Songs and musical score by Frederick Hollander...who's actually present playing piano. The three songs Dietrich sings, "Black Market", "Illusions" and "Ruins of Berlin" are lyrically integral to the plot and represent three of best songs written for a non-musical film of the late 1940's.
There's some serious plot points underneath the cynical comedy.
Wish to heck Universal would open their vaults and release it on DVD in the US; thankfully it's available in the UK (get an all-region DVD player...I did!).
It's an absolutely essential late 1940's comedy and in my opinion, one of Billy Wilder's best comedies.
Remember....Wilder's next film was "Sunset Boulevard".
And what a cast! Jean Arthur, surely one of the greatest of all Hollywood comediennes, Marlene Dietrich in a part to match her Lola Lola in Blue Angel, John Lund a great under-utilized actor with the wit and ruggedness of Clark Gable and Millard Mitchell, one of those character actors whose mold was sadly broken decades ago.
In my book this film ranks with Double Indemnity as the best work of Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett.
Great songs by the legendary Frederick Hollander who actually appears here as Dietrich's accompanist.
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.
As a German my only minor quibble with "A Foreign Affair" is the German dialogue (not the occasional "Strudel" and "Gesundheit" from the American actors, but the actual German by supporting actors and extras): in most cases it sounds embarrassingly dumb, even feebleminded. Apart from one scene that has the same level of cynicism as the English dialogue (the choleric policeman asking "You live? Do you have permission?" after the "Lorelei" round-up), only Marlene Dietrich is allowed to talk normally.
Otherwise it's one of Billy Wilder's best films (which is synonymous with being one of the best films of all time). Unfortunately you don't get characters like Captain Renault ("Casablanca"), Major Calloway ("The Third Man") or Colonel Plummer ("A Foreign Affair") anymore in contemporary films. A pity!
Jean Arthur is an uptight Congresswoman from Iowa investigating conditions in the bare ruined choirs of Berlin. The Colonel in charge of wrangling the Congressional committee is Millard Mitchell. He hands the committee members, Arthur included, a piece of boilerplate about how we are teaching the Germans about democracy and baseball. "We teach them that if they steal anything it must be second base." It's all working out very well, if only they can get those damned kids to stop drawing swastikas every place they go.
The occupation army isn't much better. It's 1948 and the Russians haven't yet become "real shifty" as they would in Wilder's "One, Two, Three," which appeared twelve years later, although even here they are pretty ugly, dumb, and given to vodka. At the climax, with a dead body on the floor, the night club is empty except for a couple of MPs and four Russians at one of the tables singing the Volga Boatman. But the American troops are taking advantage of the down-and-out Berliners as well, swapping chocolate bars and nylons for more tawdry treats. The Berliners, if they've learned nothing else, have learned the arts of survival under stress and they're very cooperative. Congresswoman Arthur notices how friendly the soldiers and Frauleins are and is perturbed.
It develops that two of the major players in this illicit system are an Army Capitain, John Lund, and a nightclub singer, Marlene Dietrich. They swap favors almost every night. Of course, Lund must wind up shepherding Arthur around and they fall in love. Dietrich is jealous about the fading interest of her meal ticket, but the two women know nothing of each other. It's just that their common interest is switching his affection from one to the other.
The script by the patrician Charles Brackett and the Jewish refugee Billy Wilder crackles with subversive wit. Nobody comes out looking spotless. Human weaknesses and strengths abound -- mostly weaknesses. The plot changes as it moves along, from mostly funny to mostly dramatic and sad. When she finds out about her man's treachery, Arthur's sadness is palpable, helped along by the photography of Charles Lang, who manages to capture convincingly the wreck that the German capital has now become. People live in piles of rubble, and the script gives them a little humanity. "Do you know what it was like to be a woman when the Russians came in?", Dietrich asks Arthur -- who has no idea.
The three songs sung by Dietrich sort of sum up the subject of the film and it's not funny romance -- "The Black Market," "Illusions," and "The Ruins of Berlin." It's funny, though. There are some good gags and amusing situations. But Billy Wilder lost his mother and some of his other family in the Nazi's genocide program, and the wisecracks seem to come out of some dark shadowy corner. It's hard to imagine how it could have been otherwise. His father's grave was buried under a heap of rubble and, when he arrived in Berlin, there were still thousands of putrefying corpses buried under the collapsed bricks.
Le saviez-vous
- AnecdotesBilly Wilder said that John Lund "was the guy you got after you wrote the part for Cary Grant and Grant wasn't available."
- GaffesThough Phoebe, the American Congresswoman played by Jean Arthur is not married, the actress's real wedding ring is visible in many scenes especially closeups during the latter part of the film.
- Citations
Erika von Schluetow: We've all become animals with exactly one instinct left. Self-preservation. Now take me, Miss Frost. Bombed out a dozen times, everything caved in and pulled out from under me. My country, my possessions, my beliefs... yet somehow I kept going. Months and months in air raid shelters, crammed in with five thousand other people. I kept going. What do you think it was like to be a woman in this town when the Russians first swept in? I kept going.
- ConnexionsEdited into L'ami allemand (2006)
Meilleurs choix
- How long is A Foreign Affair?Propulsé par Alexa
Détails
Box-office
- Budget
- 1 500 000 $ US (estimation)
- Brut – à l'échelle mondiale
- 157 $ US
- Durée1 heure 56 minutes
- Couleur
- Rapport de forme
- 1.37 : 1