Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

Console best movie i've ever seen.

Odelecol Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

evc-11418 To me, this is about Jean Arthur -- popular, but embarrassing to be above Marlene D. on the marquis. She can be adorable, but officious and trite here - ineffective. She's not the strongest talent, but really good in some things, thanks to some beauty and personality pluses. It makes me wonder how people felt about a serious subject being almost flippantly handled in many regards. If I were a Congresswoman (probably few at that time), I'd object to Arthur's characterization.

JackCerf Billy Wilder was a German-Jewish exile who cast a cold eye on both his adopted countrymen and the country he fled. This movie's premise is that the American victors of all ranks are contentedly plundering defeated Germany. While the Red Army had simply raped and looted, the Yanks are more effectively using the free market system to buy sex and black market valuables with PX cigarettes, candy bars, and other goodies, all the while telling themselves that they're teaching the Germans democracy. The Germans, meanwhile, are servile but silently unrepentant, doing the best they can to get along while telling the conquerors what they want to hear. Wilder agrees with Churchill's dictum that the Germans are always either at your throat or at your feet. He would return to this cynical take on Germany with more humor and greater emotional distance in 1960's One Two Three, but in 1947 he's still nakedly angry at the people who would have sent him to the gas chamber if they could and contemptuous of the Americans who brag about the destruction they've wrought but don't seem to get the point of it at all.Against this background we have Jean Arthur's Iowa Congresswoman Phoebe Frost, on a junket to investigate the "morale," i.e. morals, of the occupiers. Tightly repressed, she seems to view Nazism, promiscuity and the black market as part of an undifferentiated mass of European evil from which innocent American GIs must be protected. Her target and (unknowingly) rival for the affections of the same American officer, Captain Pringle, is Dietrich's Erika von Schluetter, former aristocrat, now cabaret chanteuse, whose worldly wisdom is that regimes change but men don't. Men have all the power, and a smart woman gets along by leading powerful men around by the genitals and the ego. So we get the schoolmarm and the courtesan. Captain Pringle, a formerly nice Iowa boy who has adapted enthusiastically to postwar realities, is the aide to a senior officer, Colonel Plummer. He is using his position to protect Schluetter from the authorities, who are interested in her background as the one time mistress of a senior SS officer. Plummer has his own worldly wisdom about what his men are doing but presses on with the mission.Of course Schluetter gives Frost a few European lessons in feminine wiles, a cliché as old as Wings, Frost thaws out sexually, literally letting her hair down, and Plummer eventually uses Pringle as bait to catch Schluetter's Nazi lover, but the Frost-Pringle-Schluetter love triangle doesn't really matter because John Lund plays Pringle as a straight cad instead of a lovable rogue, and you don't see what Frost would see in him except sex. The plot is nothing, the atmosphere is everything, and the atmosphere managed to offend a good many American critics, politicians and the U.S. Army at the time. Worth a look as an interesting and enjoyable period piece by a man outside the American mainstream.

wvisser-leusden 'A foreign affair' provides good entertainment in a typical mid 20th-century style. Showing morals and attitudes that aren't ours anymore. Marlene Dietrich's sparkling presence fits in well, lifting 'A foreign affair' up to its timeless dimension.Maybe a little history comes in handy as well: situated in the war-torn Berlin of 1947. 'A foreign affair' deals with the desperate poverty of the German civilians who survived the Second World War. It was 'Stunde null' (= zero hour) for them: the war lost, about 35% of their country annexed by other nations, the cities destroyed, a poor living from day to day without steady earnings, and the women permanently at risk of sexual abuse by the occupying foreign soldiers.

moonspinner55 Director Billy Wilder also co-wrote this post-WWII comedy (along with producer Charles Brackett) involving a prim, humorless Congresswoman policing American troops stationed in Occupied Berlin, finding little but celebrations and skirt-chasing from the randy soldiers. Predictably, she finds her no-nonsense nature stirred up by an army captain, though he's currently sweet on a German chanteuse. A strictly lackluster affair; Wilder means for it to be goosey and 'grown up', yet the silliness of both the conception and the uninteresting characters defeats the players. Plodding John Lund would hardly seem to rate the pounding pulses he achieves here, and Jean Arthur's spinsterish Phoebe Frost (ha ha) is an unattractive role for the actress. Only Marlene Dietrich emerges unscathed, though her song selections are poor. ** from ****