"Billy could have said with John F. Kennedy, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ "
I've been meaning to link this for a while: a brilliant and lengthy essay about one of Billy Wilder's lesser known movies, A Foreign Affair, which is brilliant. (Both the essay and the movie.) It's here. It calls the movie the most devastating and personal film of Billy Wilder’s extraordinary career in American cinema which, in a career that includes the likes of Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment, Double Indemnity and Ace in the Hole, says a lot. I'm not sure that I agree about "most devastating" in general, but if you combine it with "personal", then yes, the essay believably makes its case.
It also uses the background of its creation. So what do you do if you're a scriptwriter/director who as a young man had his first few sucesses in (and about) Berlin and loved the city then, with a passion, then had to emigrate to save your life because of the Nazis, then fell in love with the English language and America and made a career there, then came back as part of the Allied occupying forces (film crew branch) to supervise concentration camp footage edited into reeducation movies for the German population, then got confirmation from the Red Cross that most of your family who didn't make it out of Europe was murdered in Auschwitz, and then you get greenlighted a Berlin-based film, supposedly a comedy also about reeducation? If you're Billy Wilder, you ask fellow emigré Marlene Dietrich to play a card-carrying (ex, or is she?) Nazi cabaret singer, ask fellow emigré Friedrich Holländer to contribute songs for her and make A Foreign Affair.
The movie wasn't a success as far as Paramount was concerned. In the US, there were complaints that not only did it make fun of the US forces and didn't present them in a very flattering light (the male lead is a G.I. involved in the black market, and one of Wilder's typical male sell-outs, at first using his charm to distract Congresswoman Phoebe (played by Jean Arthur) from finding out he's the very thing she's supposed to be investigating while also carrying on an affair with Erika the cabaret singer), it also was mean to Jean Arthur by presenting her as as frumpy and uptight next to Marlene Dietrich.(As the article puts it: " On paper, Wilder’s film might have been viewed officially as offering a positive appraisal of the occupying forces - but that was before anyone saw it. (...) The Department of Defense issued a statement to the effect that the film gave a false account of the occupying forces’ activities abroad .") In Germany, it wasn't even released for a few more decades, having been deemed unsuitable to its ostensible purpose of moral education. (No kidding. No German gets morally reeducated in this picture.)
Sadly, YouTube doesn't have many usable clips from it. This one intercuts footage from the actual movie with footage showing the Berlin ruins in the immediate post war years from other sources:
This sequence, otoh, is entirely from the movie and probably Marlene Dietrich's best non-singing scene in it, focused on her character, Erika the morally ambiguous singer, and Phoebe the Congresswoman, who is undercover trying to pose as a German in order to investigate fraternizing G.I.s but gets caught up in a raid.
It's very much worth watching in its entirety. If you can't, read the article anyway. It's that good.
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1337031.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
It also uses the background of its creation. So what do you do if you're a scriptwriter/director who as a young man had his first few sucesses in (and about) Berlin and loved the city then, with a passion, then had to emigrate to save your life because of the Nazis, then fell in love with the English language and America and made a career there, then came back as part of the Allied occupying forces (film crew branch) to supervise concentration camp footage edited into reeducation movies for the German population, then got confirmation from the Red Cross that most of your family who didn't make it out of Europe was murdered in Auschwitz, and then you get greenlighted a Berlin-based film, supposedly a comedy also about reeducation? If you're Billy Wilder, you ask fellow emigré Marlene Dietrich to play a card-carrying (ex, or is she?) Nazi cabaret singer, ask fellow emigré Friedrich Holländer to contribute songs for her and make A Foreign Affair.
The movie wasn't a success as far as Paramount was concerned. In the US, there were complaints that not only did it make fun of the US forces and didn't present them in a very flattering light (the male lead is a G.I. involved in the black market, and one of Wilder's typical male sell-outs, at first using his charm to distract Congresswoman Phoebe (played by Jean Arthur) from finding out he's the very thing she's supposed to be investigating while also carrying on an affair with Erika the cabaret singer), it also was mean to Jean Arthur by presenting her as as frumpy and uptight next to Marlene Dietrich.(As the article puts it: " On paper, Wilder’s film might have been viewed officially as offering a positive appraisal of the occupying forces - but that was before anyone saw it. (...) The Department of Defense issued a statement to the effect that the film gave a false account of the occupying forces’ activities abroad .") In Germany, it wasn't even released for a few more decades, having been deemed unsuitable to its ostensible purpose of moral education. (No kidding. No German gets morally reeducated in this picture.)
Sadly, YouTube doesn't have many usable clips from it. This one intercuts footage from the actual movie with footage showing the Berlin ruins in the immediate post war years from other sources:
Click to viewThis sequence, otoh, is entirely from the movie and probably Marlene Dietrich's best non-singing scene in it, focused on her character, Erika the morally ambiguous singer, and Phoebe the Congresswoman, who is undercover trying to pose as a German in order to investigate fraternizing G.I.s but gets caught up in a raid.
It's very much worth watching in its entirety. If you can't, read the article anyway. It's that good.
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1337031.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.