'A Foreign Affair' - Cult Movies We Love

Legendary director Billy Wilder made a number of great films and won a trunk load of Academy Awards for both his writing and direction. In 1945 he hit the jackpot with his classic The Lost Weekend, the first serious study of alcoholism in American films. It won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor for Ray Milland. In 1950 Wilder's Sunset Boulevard was also a sensation, only being slightly upstaged by All About Eve, which won most of the Oscars that year.

In the five-year period between The Lost Weekend and Sunset Boulevard, Wilder made only two movies and both were commercial flops. The first was the musical The Emperor Waltz starring gorgeous Joan Fontaine and Bing Crosby; the other, from 1948, was A Foreign Affair, one of the great unseen gems in movie history. This bittersweet story of an American congresswoman (Jean Arthur) who goes to Berlin to check on the morale of the occupied troops is a comic gem. What she finds is Captain John Pringle (John Lund) having a torrid romance with ex-Nazi Erika von Schlutow, played by screen legend Marlene Dietrich.

Wilder went to Berlin right after the war ended and his footage of the destroyed city is prominently featured in the film. His cynical look at the occupying American forces did not find favor in Washington, and Paramount did little to promote the film so it more or less disappeared. Even today you cannot find it on Region 1 DVD, but it does appear on TCM from time to time.

A Foreign Affair is truly first rate. Some of the dialogue is priceless and both Dietrich and Arthur are fantastic. Dietrich's two best film performances were both in Billy Wilder films, and as the ex-Nazi nightclub singer who once palled around with Hitler she is brilliant. Her other great Wilder role was Christine Vole in Witness for the Prosecution with Tyrone Power, which came out a decade later. It is ironic in that she played totally unsympathetic German women in both films, because in real life Dietrich had become an American citizen and toured tirelessly during the war to raise morale, including in actual war zones.

Arthur, meanwhile, had become a star in a number of Frank Capra films, and A Foreign Affair was her second to last movie. Wilder coaxed her out of retirement to play the dowdy, sensible Iowa congresswoman, but Arthur hated the whole filming, believing that Wilder was favoring the more glamorous Dietrich. She would not even see the film when it was completed, accusing Wilder of destroying her few closeups. (According to some reports, Arthur called Wilder forty years after the film's release to say that she'd finally seen it, thought it was wonderful, and apologized for her previous behavior.)

Arthur really is wonderful in A Foreign Affair, constantly tossing off snappy dialogue. But as good as Arthur is, she just can't escape playing second fiddle to Dietrich who is totally glamorous and has three great songs. The sexual undercurrents between Lund and Dietrich are pretty amazing for 1948, especially when he brings a mattress to her bombed-out apartment. Dietrich plays her role as a survivor to the hilt, and her best scene is with Arthur when she talks about the horrors of living in Germany at the end of the war.

"We've all become animals with exactly one instinct left: self-preservation. Now take me, Miss Frost. Bombed out a dozen times, everything caved in and pulled out from under me. My country, my possessions, my beliefs. Yet somehow I kept going. Months and months in air raid shelters, crammed in with five thousand other people. I kept going. What do you think it was like to be a woman in this town when the Russians first swept in? I kept going. It was living hell. And then I found a man, and through that man a roof, and a job, and food, and... and I'm not going to lose him."

In my opinion, this monologue is the finest piece of acting Dietrich ever committed to celluloid. She is the main reason for seeing this lost classic.

A Foreign Affair did get some great reviews, particularly from the New York Times, and it was nominated for two Oscars— Best Black and White Cinematography and Best Adapted Screenplay— but did not win. Still, it's brilliantly written and performed; Wilder's irreverence and Dietrich's glamor and talent make A Foreign Affair a film you should seek out.