The Age of Commercialism

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

Much as I like most Wilder's films, I found this one almost unbearable. Wilder served with the United States Army in Germany and was promised government assistance if he made a film about Allied-occupied Germany. The result is this overlong failure with two main problems: a very thin plot, padded with lengthy and boring dialogue and three main characters unlikable in different ways.Dietrich plays to perfection the German whore Erika, an ex-Nazi, now cabaret singer who sells all that can be sold to the occupying army. Erika is manipulative and amoral, she has lost everything and wants to survive by doing whatever it takes. Dietrich is perfect in the role, beautiful and talented as usual, but a manipulative whore is hardly a likable character.Jean Arthur plays Ms. Frost (the name says it all) a frigid congresswoman investigating how the US troops behave in occupied Germany. Her character is hopelessly stupid, well beyond the stereotyped naive, innocent American abroad. Ms.Frost does not listen or observe, but jumps to the conclusions that suit her needs. Stupidity was rarely this unappealing or overdone by an actress.John Lund is Captain Pringle, a cheater and a liar, conniving with the Nazi singer and worried only about not getting caught. Lying and cheating are also not particularly endearing features.The cast moves around in destroyed Berlin, while Wilder tries to explain how subtle is the line between assisting the beaten German population or just taking advantage of them. However, it looks like the Germans also know how to take advantage of the situation and the mood of the movie is cynical. Even the happy ending is achieved fraudulently.

Shot amidst the bombed out ruins of postwar Berlin, Billy Wilder's "A Foreign Affair" positions us to sympathise with Erika Von Schluetow (Marlene Dietrich), a German glamour queen who may or may not have once worked with the German War Office. As the US military begins its occupation of Germany, Erika works nights at a local club, where she sings sad songs of regret. The patrons love her, but a US congresswoman, played by Jean Arthur, wants her apprehended.Wilder's film functions as both a hymn to the fallen and a demand that the Axis and Allies stop slandering one another and fess up to the suffering each has wrought. It's not one of Wilder's masterpieces, but his trademark cynicism shines through all the same.Dietrich - who hated Wilder's script and took the part only to pay her bills - is excellent as Erika. Her character's a poor gal struggling to get by, latching onto whatever occupier dares claim her body as post-war bounty. Jean Arthur's her nemesis, a stickler for rules and regulations who balks at post war, trans-Atlantic love affairs, be they literal or political. 7.5/10 – Once daring, now dated. Worth one viewing.

I have a different view of this film because of the performance of Jean Arthur. In my view, she was ill suited to this role. We typically want to like Jean Arthur, but in this film she is dour to a fault...almost totally unlikable and unsympathetic. But that is one of the few faults of this film. Billy Wilder -- other than the Arthur aspect -- put together a film with snappy dialog and mostly very good performances. Marlene Dietirch, who may have been a tad too old for her part (or was John Lund too young for his part?), put in a fine performance. Lund was good...never quite sure why he wasn't a bigger star. But what takes center stage in this film are the views of post-war Berlin (much of the movie was filmed on location). I had seen footage of the devastation before, but this film showed far more than I had ever seen, and I frankly was not aware the city was this far gone after the war. The print that I viewed on TCM had some distinct problems with the cinematography -- jolting blurring during certain movements, particularly when panning -- but it is not clear to me if the fault was in the original film or due to deterioration, but it was quite distracting. A good but flawed film.

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."