In addition to my fascination with "rubble films," visiting the Marlene Dietrich shrine in Berlin's Film Museum made me eager to watch again Billy Wilder's 1948 "A Foreign Affair" in which she plays a savvy survivor in the bombed-out ruins of what was Berlin. The museum has the gown she wore in the first of her three songs in the movie. Having not visited Berlin until more than a decade after the wall came down, it is also especially interesting to see how thoroughly bombed-out Berlin was 60 years ago.

At the start of the movie, a US congressional fact-finding junket flying in to Templehof provides a raison d'être for aerial shots. As in documentary footage, Roberto Rosselini's uncompromising Germany, Year Zero, the nearly as grim first postwar German film production The Murderers Are Among Us and Fred Zinneman's The Search (although I think Munich substituted for Berlin there), it looks as if there was not a single intact roof anywhere. The facades of many buildings survived, which, I guess, is why it now looks as if there are many pre-WWII buildings in Berlin.

The extent of restoration of German cities is impressive, but there is the movie to review. I have already mentioned that Dietrich has three songs. Plus the biggest musical production number in "A Foreign Affair" is performed by visiting Iowa Congresswoman Phoebe Frost (Jean Arthur) getting the Lorelei nightclub audience to sing "I-o-way" with her. "A Foreign Affair" is not a musical, however. There is a thriller subplot — actually flushing a high Gestapo official out of hiding is central to the plot, though it does not appear until late in the tale. It is not a documentary, though there is documentary footage of bombed-out Berlin (a jeep tour as well as the already mentioned look around flying in).

There is a lot of sardonic humor, but it is not a comedy like Wilder's capitalists ensnaring communists in Berlin triumphs, "Ninotchka" (which he cowrote) and One, Two Three (which he cowrote and directed and produced). Primarily it is a romantic comedy with the exhortation implicit in many romantic comedies (and earlier Dietrich movies, notably The Shanghai Express) that trust is essential, especially when it looks unwarranted. (Aside: this seems a dangerous lesson to me, since I think that usually what seems untrustworthy is untrustworthy. I think that misplaced trust is central to HIV-transmission, for instance.)

The U.S. Army denazification official, Captain John Pringle (John Lund) thinks he is worldly and not credulous. He knows that Erika von Schültow, the chanteuse (Dietrich) with whom he is making time and protecting, was not dropped by a stork on one of the chimneys of Berlin after the war. She is the mistress type, not the wife type, and he accepts that she is calculating her advantages.

His life is thrown into chaos when the congressional delegation arrives, and the one woman in it, Congresswoman Frost is carrying a birthday cake for him from one of her constituents. Capt. Pringle sells the cake on the black market. It and Congresswoman Frost both end up in the Lorelei, where the congresswoman hears the GIs who picked her up (thinking she was a local girl who could be had for black market goods) talking about Erika and the officer who must be protecting her, since she was a mistress of Hitler's (she wasn't, but this is the kind of exaggeration rife in such situations).

Congresswoman Frost enlists her fellow Iowan, Capt. Pringle, to find out who this officer could be (this to me serves as an example of misplaced trust). They stake out the apartment and don't catch Capt. Pringle—mostly because Dietrich sizes up the situation when she comes down to the street to retrieve the key she dropped out the window when the familiar jeep horn sounded.

Being a Hollywood movie, the corn-fed American is going to win in competition with European sophistication. Congresswoman Frost goes through some changes and learns some of the difficulties of existence for German women "fraternizing" with the "boys" who she also learns are not as innocent as she supposed before arriving in Berlin.

Being a postwar Hollywood movie, the woman with a career outside the house or entertainment must be domesticated, her insecurities about her femininity used to subordinate her to a suitably domineering American male.

And, despite the persona of a cynic that Wilder carefully manufactured for himself, even dire environments (the prison camp in "Stalag-17", the small, dusty Nevada town in Kiss Me, Stupid!) need not be zero-sum games in which, if someone gains, someone else must lose. Everyone wins to some degree, no one completely triumphs.

I don't know that Wilder (and his cowriter, Charlie Brackett) "identified" with any of the characters. The bemused and tolerant viewpoint of the film is closest to that of Col. Plummer, who has to manage the occupying army and invading busybodies and plotting to capture the hiding war criminal. Millard Mitchell ("Twelve o'clock high") played the part deftly.

I'd guess that Dietrich sympathized with those who did what they had to do to survive, although she left Germany while the Nazis were a minority party and was closer to combat than most generals (on either side) in her front-line entertaining of US troops during the war. Her screen persona was a nonjudgmental woman who preserved her dignity and allure through any and all challenges. She had one of the greatest shrugs in screen history (the "OK, that happened, but are you going to condemn me?" looks). I don't think much of her singing voice, but she definitely could sell a song. In "A Foreign Affair," she had some Brechtian songs , the greatest of which is "Want to buy some illusions, slightly-used, second-hand?"

I look askance at the transformation of the film's first-billed star. It's not that I don't like Jean Arthur in general or herein. I don't like her being degraded and she does smiling through the humiliation (hurt but brave) affectingly. Indeed, she goes from being a priggish buffoon to having wisdom and getting the man, so one can't feel too sorry for her—at least not for very long. The problem (for me) is that her makeup and (key-)lighting is glamorous when she's supposed to be the plain Jane without makeup who La Dietrich can liken to a spic/n-span American kitchen floor. She changes dresses, but (like Joan Crawford's working-class characters) looks and is filmed as a glamorous movie star from the get-go.

John Lund is more than adequate as the officer less able to deal with competing demands of two women and a colonel than he thinks he is—in the sophisticated but addled tradition of Cary Grant in screwball comedies. The only other role I can remember Lund in (in the tearjerker "To Each His Own" that got Olivia de Haviland one of her Oscars, playing a mother who gave up her son so he could have a better life), he also played a captain. (I have no memory of him in "High Society," the only other title in his filmography I recognize as something I've seen.)

"A Foreign Affair" moves along. The most didactic part is punctuated by Jean Arthur's skepticism. The message that the world is more complicated than monolingual, insulated Americans think remains all too relevant, and it is delivered in an entertaining package of female icons and documentation of ruins of staggering extent. Oh yes, the gown in Berlin looks even better in the film, photographed in shimmering black-and-white worn by Dietrich, who does not look tiny onscreen.


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Reviews of Billy Wilder movies not mentioned in this review

The Fortune Cookie
Irma la Douce

And on the immediate postwar struggle for survival in Germany, see The Invention of Curried Sausage and the great movie about corruption and misplaced trust in postwar Vienna, "The Third Man."

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*For those who think of Wilder primarily as a director of comedies, as he eventually became, it bears noting that "A Foreign Affair" was made between "The Lost Weekend" and "Sunset Boulevard", or in a larger bracket, between "Double Indemnity" and "Ace in the Hole."



Recommended:
Yes