Today is Jean Arthur’s day here at TCM’s Summer Under the Stars and one of her movies playing is A Foreign Affair, from 1948, directed by Billy Wilder and co-written by him, Charles Brackett, and Richard Breen. Well, it turns out that very movie became one of my unexpected delights a few years back at the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring, MD. It’s a theater that, when I lived there, I went to once a week at least. Several weeks saw two or three visits by my wife and I but it was guaranteed that at least once a week we would because every Saturday at 11:00 they would run a different movie from the studio period. For instance, checking out their schedule for next Saturday, they’re running Niagara at 11:00 and the following Saturday, The African Queen. And, of course, they run new movies from all over the world each and every day as well as special revivals but what I loved about them was that Saturday matinee because there was no fanfare, just a morning movie from the past. My wife and I would often show up without even checking the schedule. One day, we showed up and A Foreign Affair was playing. Neither of us had ever seen it, nor heard anything about it from anyone we knew so we were going to see it totally fresh and, lucky for us, on the big screen just as intended. We loved it. I haven’t seen it since. Why? I don’t want to break the spell.
The program guide available in the lobby gave a brief synopsis of the plot and story surrounding the movie so I was excited to see both Jean Arthur and Marlene Dietrich appearing together in the same movie as they are and were two of my favorite stars from the period. It also had John Lund, an actor I was, admittedly, not very familiar and the few things I had seen him in made little impression on me. In this movie, he would be playing Captain John Pringle, U.S. Army man stationed in post-war Berlin as a part of the American contingent. Arthur would be playing a congresswoman from Iowa and Dietrich a torch singer under suspicion of being a former lover of a Nazi bigwig, either Goring or Goebbels. It sounded interesting, we got a couple of coffees and bagels and took our favorite seats. The lights went down and the movie began (another great thing about the Saturday matinees: No ads or trailers, the movie just starts).
Right from the beginning the movie grabbed me. Filmed on location in bombed out Berlin, the sets are striking for what would be best called a romantic comedy, albeit a dark one with serious undertones. But a romantic comedy nonetheless and yet, there it is, right from the start, aerial footage of the devastation below as Congresswoman Phoebe Frost makes her way to meet with the soldiers serving overseas and to investigate Erika von Schlütow, the Dietrich character. Seeing scenes play out in front of the destroyed shells of buildings in any movie from that period would be compelling but seeing those backdrops in a comedic setting somehow makes them stand out more. When we see where Erika is living, her “apartment” nothing more than the remains of a room in a formerly occupied building, there is an immediate weight to the comedy that wouldn’t be there otherwise. When we discover that Lund’s Pringle is in fact her lover, and knows she formerly bedded Nazis, it gets even more compelling.
Billy Wilder was making a movie about Germans like Erika who were complicit in the schemes of a regime that brought about mass destruction and death on an unprecedented scale but was making his statements in the form of a comedy because it was, perhaps, the safest way to make those statements in a postwar world that wanted to move on. Besides, he got government assistance to make a movie in Allied occupied Germany and since there were no strings attached to what that would have to be, he used the chance to make this revealing and dark comedy. One of the immediately noticeable aspects of the movie is its treatment of the Pringle character. He’s a con man and rake, not the kind of heroic portrayal of a World War II officer you would expect to see in a movie about the war. Then there’s the duplicitous nature of so many involved. Erika is a character at once repellent but also ultimately human and, in the end, comes off as someone who was just looking to survive any way she could. If that meant shacking up with a Nazi chief during the war and then with an American officer after the war, so be it. Finally, it’s trivial but Arthur’s Congresswoman is a Republican. In almost every political movie in existence from the studio period, politicians are never specifically associated with a party so just hearing her assigned to one gives the movie one extra small level of realism.
Jean Arthur, Marlene Dietrich, and John Lund are all three superb in their roles. I knew Arthur and Dietrich would be but was surprised how good and affecting Lund was. Oh, and Millard Mitchell plays the commanding officer and he’s simply wonderful. Mitchell died at the very young age of 50 and so his career wasn’t nearly as long as most studio era character actors but most movie fans will recognize him immediately as R.F. Simpson from Singin’ in the Rain.
Billy Wilder went to Berlin in the years following World War II and made a dark romantic comedy that not only holds up today but should be far better known and/or remembered than it is. A Foreign Affair is not just a great comedy by the great team of Wilder and Brackett (and Breen) but a great post-war movie, period. In fact, it’s one of the best. It comes on today at noon on the east coast and if you have a chance, see it. I highly recommend it.