I'm on a roll lately. Tonight I watched another previously unknown classic discovered in the library database : "A Foreign Affair" (1948), starring Jean Arthur, Marlene Dietrich and John Lund, and directed by the great Billy Wilder, who also co-wrote the witty script. Besides being a legendary director, Wilder was also one of the best screenwriters in the business.
The movie opens inside an airplane, flying over postwar Germany. Inside the cabin are a group of Congressmen and one Congresswoman (Arthur). They are to land in Berlin to assess the living conditions and morale of the occupying American troops, and to report back to Washington with their findings. Before they land, we are shown real life aerial footage of the city, and it looks like a wasteland. Berlin has been bombed nearly into the proverbial Stone Age. The remains of buildings still stand, but at most they are empty shells. Many have only a single wall. Rubble is everywhere.
Here you see what the war was like. Dresden and Tokyo were even worse.
But the story is to be a satire, not a heavy drama. Jean Arthur, an exceptionally talented actress and comedienne, plays the uptight Congresswoman from Iowa. Unlike her Capitol Hill colleagues, who are content to give the situation a once-over and go home, she is determined to uncover any amoral behavior on the part of the American boys that she can turn up. She is a grade-A prude, all pinned up in formal clothing and tight piled braids. Being that the film is a comedy, the first thing she does is detach herself from the investigative committee in order to roam the ruined city of Berlin by herself. It is a dangerous mission, in a lighthearted way. With her blonde braids, she looks like a German Fraulein, so in short order she is hit on by two goofball American soldiers and taken to a nightclub. She goes along with this, feigning a German accent, so she can get into the nightclub anonymously. Her aim is to catch American soldiers inside such a sinful place, they who are supposed to be upholding the values of the United States!
Once inside the club, she ditches the two soldiers to focus on a man in an officer's uniform. He is John Lund, an Army Captain who is obviously smitten with the cabaret singer on stage at that moment. She is of course Marlene Dietrich, and I have to break in here to have a laugh and say that I am 100% certain that Mel Brooks has seen this film, because Madeline Kahn's character of "Lili Von Schtupp" in "Blazing Saddles" has gotta be based, in part, on Dietrich's performance here.
But yeah, so the crusading Jean Arthur determines that Captain Lund is having an affair with Marlene the German nightclub singer. Using her investigative wiles, Arthur then discovers that Dietrich is a former Nazi, one whose connections reached all the way up to Der Fuhrer! Arthur finds photographs of her with a Gestapo chief, who turns out to have been her boyfriend. Now John Lund, an American Captain, is romancing her. The outrage! To make matters worse, Captain Lund is dashingly handsome in a Clark Gable way, and Congresswoman Arthur is seriously repressed. We know the real reason she wants to shut this romance down, even if she says it is because it's against Army regulations.
Lund is terribly afraid of being caught at Marlene's apartment, which - unlike most buildings in the city, is mostly intact. Marlene is being protected by Lund, even though his Colonel knows of her Nazi past. She goes about the city unbothered, not needing to show paperwork. Something is up with her.
Lund, however, has a big problem. Jean Arthur is on a rampage to shut down his romance and bring him up on charges of fraternizing with a Nazi. The only thing for him to do, in true Billy Wilder style, is to turn his attention to her. After all, isn't that what she really wants?
I know, I know, this is the Me Too era and we are all on equal footing now. But if you see the film and you see how it is played by Jean Arthur and John Lund, you will see there is really no sexism involved (and I feel like an idiot that I keep making these disclaimers, whatever happened to common sense?), but back to the story (and turn off italics), Lund's ploy works.
The Congresswoman comes alive under his spell. Soon they are spending moonlit nights together and she is dressing in evening gowns bought at the Berlin black market. Now she is complicit herself, but she feels so alive for the first time in her life, in love with abandon.
It is a tribute to the talent of Jean Arthur, an actress who was in some major films but who is for some ridiculous reason not well known, that the farcical aspect of "A Foreign Affair" works as well as it does. She is co-starring with some big time talent, especially in the case of Dietrich, but it is Arthur who carries the movie and takes her character from repression to liberation, with a temporary tragedy near the end. If you haven't seen her before, you will think "my goodness, who is this actress"?
The romance of Arthur and Lund eclipses that of his affair with Dietrich, but she is a survivor and her story is given some weight also. The plight of women in Nazi Germany is given consideration. As a nightclub star, Dietrich had it made under Hitler. Had she refused him, though, she would have been toast. So she is stuck in the middle of her morality. She is neither righteous nor unrighteous, but merely a sad character in the long run, and certainly not a stand up human being.
Being that this is a Billy Wilder film, there is so much that is happening not only in the enactment of every scene, and in the dialogue, but even in the motion of the actors around the furniture - the staging.
Once again, all credit goes to Arthur, but also to Marlene Dietrich. She is known, 80 or 90 years later, as a Hollywood icon for gay people and as a sexual/cultural stereotype, but in reality she was one of the greatest actresses from early Hollywood, and any performance she gave would easily compare to the best actresses of today. In fact, I think that the actors and actresses of old Hollywood were, in their stylised way, perhaps better than their descendants.
I could list the reasons for this, but it would take me some consideration, because modern actors - the best of them anyway - are incredible in their own right. But they haven't the screen charisma of the early Hollywood Stars, and the earlybirds were every bit as talented at their craft.
Anyhow, I hope that I have given you enough of the story to encourage you to see the film for yourself. I write off the top of my head and never know til later how many tangents I have gone off on, haha. No time to edit, unfortunately. ////
Two Huge Thumbs Up, then, to "A Foreign Affair". I will be looking for more films with Jean Arthur.
Have a great Fourth Of July tomorrow, and I will see you at the usual time, after the fireworks in Porter Ranch. Tons of love. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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