Synopsis
It would make a cigar store Indian laugh ...
In occupied Berlin, an army captain is torn between an ex-Nazi cafe singer and the U.S. congresswoman investigating her.
A Foreign Affair
1948 Directed by Billy Wilder
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Alternative Titles
Чуждeстранна афера, Berliinin raunioiden keskellä, A Sua Melhor Missão, Külügyi szívügyek, Scandal international, Ljubezen na tujem, Günahsiz melek, Moralens vokter, La mundana, Det hændte i Berlin, Escándalo internacional, Een avontuur in Berlijn, Floga kai pathos, Sprawa zagraniczna
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"If you give a hungry man a loaf of bread, that's democracy. If you leave the wrapper on, that's imperialism!"
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A Foreign Affair is the rare Golden Age movie you cannot take at face value. It is nothing like what it appears to be on the outside, much less what the awful synopsis on Letterboxd indicates. Billy Wilder molded a wittily painful, comic-tragic story into one ingenious whole, fusing two genres seamlessly. He placed two actresses dissimilar in style (but definitely in a league of their own) at the symbolic gist of his two intertwining stories, and spread out his yarn according to the two mindsets, two outlooks on life they personified on the bilateral scale of post-WW2 reality: Jean Arthur epitomizing the American dream, the naive hopefulness and ever-blooming positivity of life, Marlene Dietrich the oh-so-European realism, tinged with…
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Between the legends of “Sunset Boulevard” and “The Lost Weekend” is stuffed “Foreign Affair;” a forgotten gem in the ornate jewellery box of Billy Wilder’s career.
“Affair,” a film Wilder promised to make at the behest of the US Army, captures a flashpoint of the director’s early romantic comedy tapered through the lens of his several-year descent into the noir genre.
Wilder could play the happy clown and the sadistic lion-tamer at will. The harmony between his two natures was perfected in later works such as “The Apartment” and “Witness for the Prosecution.” But with “Affair,” it seems it a trick he was always capable of pulling.
A romance set amidst the ruins of post-WWII Berlin, “Affair” is fertile material for…
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You know what, this might just be my favourite Jean Arthur performance. I mean, it’s not every day you get to see her champagne drunk, throat croaking-err- singing her Midwestern little heart out about her hometown Iowa to a packed Berlin black market nightclub as she’s egged on by one Marlene Dietrich.
It’s also one of the sharpest, most quick-witted wartime satires this side of Strangelove. Cynical and sarcastic in its ironies, yet the account here is nobly told with authentic magnanimity, this Germany one of pitiful people struggling to survive rather than that of a cruel enemy to hate.
It’s also in serious contention for the directors most visually striking. Beneath the rubble and destruction of it’s broken…
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jean arthur and marlene dietrich come this 👌🏻 close to kissing and it nearly killed me. if only john lund wasn’t a mustachioed creep this movie could really be something special.
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If I had a single criticism of A Foreign Affair it would be that the truly humbling sight of its setting completely dwarfs the weight of its script. Shot in the bombed out ruins of Berlin in 1947 not long after the end of The Second World War. The result of close to 400 Allied bombing raids had left a landscape of jaw dropping devastation and that was after two years of tidying up. A love triangle comedy with a fairly predictable plot progression feels way too light, even if the whole film has a cynical undercurrent throughout.
Jean Arthur came out of retirement to play Phoebe Frost, an idealistic Iowa Congresswoman who after landing in post-war Berlin begins an…
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BILLY! SIR! you could have cast joel mccrea in john lund's part and changed his name so it wasn't captain johnny pringle and this could have been so GOOD! SIR! instead of john lund, king of having a crooked mustache and no sex appeal, you could have had alluring body language icon joel being ALL sensuality and NO creepiness! and we could have seen joel mccrea onscreen with marlene dietrich which would have been SO sexy! what the fuck!
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This movie was so funny and so sexy and I am every single one of those officers following Marlene at the end because WOW.
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'Don't tell me it's subversive to kiss a Republican!' (John Lund as Captain John Pringle)
Brief Synopsis: A staid congresswoman in post-war Berlin (Jean Arthur) investigates an ex-Nazi torch singer (Marlene Dietrich) with the assistance/hindrance of an American army captain (Lund) who is conducting a secret affair with the Berlin songstress.
Verdict: Well, well, well, the power of a Wilder rewatch! After being ridiculed for my low rating of this film - based on a single viewing many, many years ago - and having noticed that a few people whose opinion I respect on here rate it very highly, I decided to take a metaphorical plunge into the waters of a film which earned scathing criticism at the time of…
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A Billy Wilder film that needs rediscovery. On the surface, a romantic black comedy about a prim ice queen congresswoman, Phoebe Frost (Jean Arthur) on a fact finding mission in post WWII Berlin. She sees a lot of corruption and sets her sights on ex-Nazi chanteuse, Erika von Schluetow (Marlene Dietrich) who seems to have an American officer protecting her identity. That officer, Capt. John Pringle, (John Lund) she has already met and mistaken for an upstanding example of Iowa goodness and moral righteousness, is the man she chooses to help her investigate the matter. Early on, I assumed that we'd find out that Dietrich's Erika had been a double agent or some other cover for her clear Nazi affiliations,…
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