★ 7 / 10
Billy Wilder pulls together a great script and
CinemaSerf
Billy Wilder pulls together a great script and two engaging performances from Jean Arthur and Marlene Dietrich in this entertaining story of a US Congresswoman…
Billy Wilder pulls together a great script and two engaging performances from Jean Arthur and Marlene Dietrich in this entertaining story of a US Congresswoman who visits post-war Berlin to check up on the morals of the American troops. She falls for one of them who just happens to be already spoken for. There ensues a bit of a tug-of-war between the two women over the rather charmless John Lund. Millard Mitchell is good value as the war-weary colonel; there are enough Dietrich songs to keep her fans content and we even get a twist at the end. There may well have been some murmurings Stateside once this film was released. It doesn't exactly show the Yanks in a great light as they party and black-market their way through a bomb wrecked Berlin but it does demonstrate the need for a "release" for so many from the years of war and deprivation with style and occasionally, some humour.
★ 8 / 10
A little history is a useful thing
rhoda-9
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…
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."
100%
TOMATOMETER
· 14 reviews
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AUDIENCE
· 1K ratings
7.3/10
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Thanks, please keep these old films coming!