A Foreign Affair

Billy Wilder goes back to Berlin after the war and doesn't like it much. If you're expecting a capricious romantic comedy, you won't find it here.

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.

The main impression left by "A Foreign Affair" is Billy Wilder's nobility toward German people. With authentic magnanimity, he chooses to represent Germans as a pitiful people struggling to survive, not a cruel enemy to hate. The movie has an intrinsic historical interest, since it was filmed in 1948 Berlin, completely destroyed by bombs. As usual in Wilder's works, the plot is beautifully constructed, the dialogue is witty and funny, irony, sarcasm and anti-rhetoric are spread along the movie. In the opening scenes we see army captain John Lund at the black-market, selling a cake, hand-made by his American sweetheart and coming from the States, to buy a gift for his Berliner lover Marlene Dietrich. By the way, Dietrich and most Berliner women seem to be on the verge of prostitution, just to get primary goods to survive in post-war disaster. Lund meets Jean Arthur, a US congresswoman committed in hunting nazi war criminals. As a matter of fact, we follow Lund's attempts to destroy evidence of Dietrich's nazi past: a behavior by the captain not exactly patriotic, nor ethic. The finale is deeper than it appears at a first sight: brutal tyranny, based on terror and slaughter, is doomed to be annihilated, buried under the rubble; pretty girls remain, helping us to spend our life on this unhappy earth.

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.

This is one of those comedies that will always exist in the stratosphere of wit, intelligence and truth. It pulls no punches about politics, greed, hypocrisy & opportunism and treats its audience like grown-ups. It is as applicable to today's congress and the situation in Iraq as it was to post-WWII Germany (to which today's politicians still make frequent comparisons). It also was the first film to unflinchingly capture the effects of the WWII devastation of Berlin.

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.

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."