Billy Wilder: A Foreign Affair (1948)

Poster: A Foreign Affair
Film poster for Billy Wilder's comedy A Foreign Affair (1948)
© akg images/Album/Paramount Pictures

Billy Wilder: A Foreign Affair (1948)

Was ich für A Foreign Affair zuerst vor Augen hatte, waren die Bilder des total zerstörten Berlins, wie ich es 1945 gesehen hatte und nicht mehr aus dem Kopf bekam.

[What I had in mind initially for A Foreign Affair was the pictures of a totally destroyed Berlin as I saw it in 1945 and couldn't get out of my mind. (ed. trans.)]

Billy Wilder


The director Billy Wilder had volunteered for the US Army in 1942, but had not been enlisted. Only after the end of the war in 1945 was he sent as a film envoy to war-ravaged Germany. With his knowledge of the local film scene, he was charged with reconstruction and denazification of the the German film industry. During this period, he developed the idea of a propagandistic feature film intended to educate the German public on democracy without pointing fingers. His suggestion received a sympathetic hearing, but was not implemented. Two years later he filmed A Foreign Affair using material he had filmed in Berlin in 1945. The film is about the prim congresswoman Phoebe Frost (Jean Arthur), who is sent to investigate the morals of American soldiers. During her investigation, she encounters the notorious nightclub singer Erika von Schlütow (Marlene Dietrich), who is having an affair with the American officer John Pringle (John Lund). Her true lover, however, is a wanted Nazi who is to be brought to justice.

The completed film irritated the American authorities and was classified as unsuitable for the German public: a comedy with the devastated Berlin as a backdrop in which the occupying soldiers cavorted with the local female population did not conform to the image authorities wished to project.

Film critics, by contrast, almost unanimously praised A Foreign Affair: Wilder had once again succeeded in presenting a broadly cheeky film to the American public. 

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