A Foreign Affair

A Foreign Affair is a 1948 American romantic comedy-drama film directed by Billy Wilder and starring Jean Arthur, Marlene Dietrich, and John Lund. The screenplay by Charles Brackett, Wilder, and Richard L. Breen is based on a story by David Shaw adapted by Robert Harari.

The film is about a United States Army captain in post-World War II Berlin, occupied by the Allies during the early days of the Cold War, who is torn between an ex-Nazi cafe singer and the United States congresswoman investigating her. Though a comedy, the film has a serious and cynical political tone, attesting to the fascination of both Wilder and American audiences with the multiple legacies of Berlin.

Plot
In 1947 in post-World War II Berlin, prim Iowa Congresswoman Phoebe Frost arrives with a US congressional committee on a fact-finding mission to investigate the morale of American occupation troops reportedly infected by a “moral malaria.” Corruption runs rampant, with troops taking advantage of supply shortages for items such as stockings, coffee, and soap to profiteer and elicit privileges from local women. Officials defend the behavior of the troops, saying it is unfair to expect the same troops to be “both valorous and wise.”

Phoebe arrives with a birthday cake for a constituent’s boyfriend, Captain John Pringle. Although John tells her that he will share the scarce treat with his army buddies, he trades the valuable chocolate cake on the black market for a mattress for his lover, Erika von Schlütow. MPs arrive to question Erika, who because of her past had been ordered to a labor camp for brickwork. Instead, she has been working in a nightclub, protected by her relationship with Pringle. The MPs order Erika to report to the de-Nazification office, but Pringle sends them away.

On a tour of bombed-out Berlin, Phoebe notices how many US soldiers fraternize with local women. The guide describes how they are winning over the population, but Phoebe wonders who is influencing whom. Slipping away from the tour, Phoebe is mistaken for a local by two American soldiers, pretends to speak only broken English, and accompanies them to the Club Lorelei, the most popular troop hangout. There she sees cabaret torch singer Erika von Schlütow, who Phoebe's escorts gossip is suspected of being the former mistress of either Hermann Göring or Joseph Goebbels, and is being protected by an unidentified American officer. At the nightclub Phoebe enlists Captain Pringle to assist in her investigation of Erika, unaware that he is Erika's current lover.

After seeing Erika with Adolf Hitler in a newsreel filmed during the war, Phoebe asks John to take her to army headquarters to retrieve the singer's official file. To distract her, John woos Phoebe, who initially resists his advances. When Phoebe berates the ethics of American soldiers who cavort with former Nazis, John asks Phoebe whether she ever had a romance against her political ethics. She tells him how enamored she was of a Southern Congressman who romanced her just to get her vote. Taking his cue, John turns on the charm, to which Phoebe eventually succumbs.

Erika questions why he has not been seeing her lately. John comments that he never realized how deeply involved she was with Nazi officials and questions whether next year she might be romancing officers wearing a hammer and sickle. When Erika mocks his wooing of Phoebe, he responds coldly and departs. He and Phoebe end up at Club Lorelei, where Erika joins their table and needles Phoebe.

Aware of John’s relationship with Erika, Colonel Plummer orders him to continue seeing her to serve as bait for ex-Gestapo agent Hans Otto Birgel, believed hiding in the American occupation zone. A letter has been intercepted in which the jealous Birgel has threatened to kill Erika’s new lover.

Meanwhile, Erika and Phoebe are arrested during a raid at the Lorelei designed to catch Germans without proper identification papers. At the police station, Erika claims Phoebe is her cousin to secure her release without revealing her identity, avoiding scandal. At Erika’s apartment, Erika now explains that Phoebe is now in her debt and owes her John—her protector. When John arrives, Phoebe―out of his line of sight―sees John kissing Erika and leaves humiliated.

At the military airport waiting for departure, Phoebe tells Colonel Plummer that she will not be filing her report, since she feels ethically compromised herself. Colonel Plummer shares a dossier with Phoebe that discloses that John has been working on orders all along to use Erika to lead them to Birgel and now has a target on his back. Plummer tells Phoebe that John’s feelings for her have complicated matters.

Birgel appears at the Lorelei to shoot John, but Birgel is shot first by American soldiers. Erika is arrested for her complicity with Birgel. With an assist from Colonel Plummer, Phoebe and John are finally united.

Production
While serving with the United States Army in Germany during World War II, Billy Wilder was promised government assistance if he made a film about Allied-occupied Germany, and he took advantage of the offer by developing A Foreign Affair with Charles Brackett and Richard L. Breen. Erich Pommer, who was responsible for the rebuilding of the German film industry, placed what was left of the facilities at Universum Film AG at Wilder's disposal. While researching the existing situation for his screenplay, he interviewed many of the American military personnel stationed in Berlin, as well as its residents, many of whom were having difficulty dealing with the destruction of their city. One of them was a woman he met while she was clearing rubble from the streets. "The woman was grateful the Allies had come to fix the gas", Wilder later recalled. "I thought it was so she could have a hot meal, but she said it was so she could commit suicide".

Marlene Dietrich was Wilder's first choice to play Erika, and Friedrich Hollaender already had written three songs – "Black Market", "Illusions", and "The Ruins of Berlin" – for her to sing in the film (the lyrics were closely tied to the plot), but the director suspected she would be opposed to portraying a woman who collaborated with the Nazis. En route home from Berlin, he stopped in Paris to visit her, ostensibly to hear her opinion about a screen test he had made with June Havoc. "She kept making criticisms and suggestions ... and finally I said, like I had thought of it just that moment, 'Marlene, only you can play this part.' And she agreed with me", Wilder said.

Wilder persuaded Jean Arthur, who was attending college at the time, to come out of retirement to play Phoebe. Throughout filming, the actress felt the director was favoring Dietrich, and late one night she and her husband Frank Ross went to Wilder's home to confront him with her suspicions. "Marlene told you to burn my close-up", an extremely upset Arthur insisted. "She doesn't want me to look better than she does." Wilder, knowing such insecurities were common when two very different personalities were working together, tried to reassure her he was not playing favorites, although of all the actresses he directed, he admired Dietrich most of all. "The crews adored her ... She liked to find somebody with a cold, so she could make chicken soup for him. She loved to cook", Wilder recollected. Years later, Arthur called Wilder to tell him she finally had seen the film and liked it, apologized and said she would act in any future Wilder project.

Location shooting, much of it in the Soviet occupation zone, began in August 1947, and filming continued at Paramount Pictures in Hollywood between December 1947 and February 1948. The film was edited within a week after principal photography was completed, and it premiered at the Paramount Theatre in New York City on June 30, 1948, shortly after Wilder's The Emperor Waltz opened at Radio City Music Hall.

Critical response
Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called the film "a dandy entertainment which has some shrewd and realistic things to say" and added, "Congress may not like this picture . . . and even the Department of the Army may find it a shade embarrassing. For the Messrs. Brackett and Wilder, who are not the sort to call a spade a trowel . . . are here making light of regulations and the gravity of officialdom in a smoothly sophisticated and slyly sardonic way". He continued, "Under less clever presentation this sort of traffic with big stuff in the current events department might be offensive to reason and taste. But as handled by the Messrs. Brackett and Wilder . . . it has wit, worldliness and charm. It also has serious implications, via some actuality scenes in bombed Berlin, of the wretched and terrifying problem of repairing the ravages of war. Indeed, there are moments when the picture becomes down-right cynical in tone, but it is always artfully salvaged by a hasty nip-up of the yarn".

In later years, Channel 4 lauded A Foreign Affair as "one of Wilder's great forgotten films ... worthy of rapid rediscovery", while Andrea Mullaney of Eye For Film wrote in 2006 that the film was "talky, intelligent, cynical" and "as relevant to the current American involvement in Iraq as if it had been made yesterday".

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 100% based on 14 reviews, with an average rating of 7.5/10. Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 75 out of 100, based on 7 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.

The Blu-ray release garnered positive reviews.

Accolades
Charles Lang was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Black-and-White Cinematography, but lost to William H. Daniels for The Naked City. Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett, and Richard L. Breen were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay but lost to John Huston for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and the Writers Guild of America Award, which was won by Frank Partos and Millen Brand for The Snake Pit.

Home media
A Foreign Affair has been released in both VHS and DVD formats. On November 27, 2006, the film was released as part of the 18-film Marlene Dietrich: The Movie Collection for the UK market. However, in April 2007, Dietrich's estate, Die Marlene Dietrich Collection GmbH, obtained an injunction which forced Universal Pictures to withdraw the DVD set due to an alleged contract breach.

In 2012, Universal through TCM released the two-DVD set Directed by Billy Wilder featuring Five Graves to Cairo and A Foreign Affair.

On August 25, 2019, A Foreign Affair was released on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber.