A Foreign Affair

Billy Wilder – 1948 – USA

One of Billy Wilder’s hardest-to-find movies, (at this late date still lacking a Region 1 DVD release), A Foreign Affair is a shimmering masterpiece of razor sharp satire and wit, confirming Wilder’s status as the master of such fare.  Rarely are pathos, suspense and genuine humor fused so beautifully as in a Wilder film.  A famous cynic, he despaired at the greed, cruelty and partisanship in the human condition, and yet he also truly felt for his characters; (making his films very different from the glum misanthropy in those by fellow cynics like Bergman and Antonioni).  Jean Arthur is a prim Congresswoman sent to post-war Berlin to investigate the morale of US soldiers.  She crosses paths with one, John Lund, a jaded opportunist who (like so many others) has prospered thanks to the black market and has no desire to leave.  Lund, meanwhile, is involved with nightclub singer Marlene Dietrich, whose connections to big shots in the defeated Third Reich make her a target of the Allies trying to re-assemble Germany.  It’s a Cold War milieu Wilder would return to with even more edge in One, Two, Three (1961).  The cinematography is out of American film noir and the setting out of European neo-realism, and yet at its heart the film is the warmest of comedies about lonely, guarded people struggling to trust each other and find reasons not to give up on humanity.