The scene has always seemed creepy to me—"rapey" is the term I've been using the last few years as I've been looking at older movies (and more than a few new ones)—in the "movie" version of the affairs between men and women. What might have been intended—and previously seen—as cinema romance, now comes across as aggressive and devious. It is no excuse that this scene from Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair is, purposely, a bit of both.
Sexual harassment in Hollywood has been in the news lately (were any of us surprised? Probably only if you were male...or incredibly naive). But the evidence has always been there. Hell, it's even in the product, part and parcel of Hollywood's propensity of making melodrama out of drama (in as few frames of film as possible), and thereby influencing our behavior by its example. Do any of us see the romance of movies as real? Probably, whether we wish to admit it or not.
Take A Foreign Affair, Billy Wilder's post-war burnt-at-the-lace valentine to his country of origin (he fled in the early days of the Nazi gleichschaltung), and an attempt to educate Americans on Marshall's occupation/rebuilding efforts, with a small injection of Hollywood funds as aid, and a melancholy rumination of a country in ruin, physically and morally (at one point, over shots of the crumbling husk that was Berlin, the soundtrack plays "Isn't It Romantic?").
Here, a straight-laced congressperson goes all weak-kneed over the manipulations of her military escort, who is only attempting to seduce her while trying to derail her efforts investigating his lover, a former Nazi collaborator (who has never lost her zeal for better living by charming whichever side is winning). She's duplicitous and he is her perfect match. He knows he's doing wrong playing around with a Nazi chanteusse, but can't help himself and to keep her...and him...from being found out, he'll resort to any blackmail, the snake.
This one's tough to watch with more modern sensibilities—in its way, it is its own little version of immoral capitulation in the guise of light entertainment, and the way the film ends? Well, it may seem all rosy at the fade-out, but after the light's come up? After the movie ends? Things can't end well. But, then, Wilder was just starting to come into his blackest noir phase with Sunset Boulevard and Ace in the Hole on their way (to be followed by his comedy in a POW camp, Stalag 17). He would still have a moral center to his work, but he would tread in dark alleys that even his mentor, Ernst Lubitsch would not enter. Even when producing the most piquant of wines it will eventually turn to vinegar.
The Set-Up: Post-war Germany. The SECOND post-war Germany. A congressional delegation has flown to Berlin to investigate the morale and the morals of the military force occupying the country and to make sure tax-money is being well spent, efficiently and not being squandered (obviously this takes place in the past century, not this one). This is why they fly there in person, spending tax-payer's dollars, to make sure tax-dollars are not being squandered (couldn't they have sent cables?). Congresswoman Phoebe Frost (Jean Arthur) is shocked to learn that a former Nazi hanger-on, Erika von Schluetow (Marlene Dietrich) is making a much-better-than-living wage than her job as a saloon singer might rake in; she suspects there may be some collusion between one of the occupying force and this notorious femme fasciste. And in a case of not seeing the forest for the trees, she does not know that the captain assigned to accompany her investigation, Captain John Pringle (John Lund), is the one who has been colluding with Fraulein von Schluetow...and colluding with her practically every night.
Action.
PRINGLE: If it is at all, but I don't think it is.
PRINGLE: Sure.
PRINGLE: Schlage, Schlangenberg, Schlagenspitz, Schlitz...
FROST: There, there, there.
PRINGLE: Here's the Schluetows. Anton, Emil, Fritz, Gottfried, Waldemar...
FROST: No Erika.
PRINGLE: Yes?
PRINGLE: Oh, no.
PRINGLE: I pity anybody who has you on his trail.
PRINGLE: Did it occur to you there might be extenuating circumstances?
FROST: ...von Salm, von Salzburg, von...
FROST: It's about time such wrecks were hauled back into a garage. Anyone who forgets he's an American...
PRINGLE: The loneliness is all stored up in him right down to his boots and it's driving him crazy.
FROST: Yes, I want him to ask, I want to make sure he's not doing something subversive.
PRINGLE: Not really.
FROST: I was serving on a very important subcommittee, there were five of us. One was a Southern Democrat. His convictions were as different from mine as night from day. I hated everything he stood for. I despised his politics.
PRINGLE: What did you do, Miss Frost?
FROST: I filibustered.
PRINGLE: You what?
FROST: No. -
PRINGLE: No more what you call yearning? -
FROST: No. -
FROST: None of your business.
PRINGLE: Why not? You're not a Nazi. Don't tell me it's subversive to kiss a Republican.
PRINGLE: Yeah. Now I know how I'll cast my absentee ballot come re-election.
FROST: I'm here on official business. -
PRINGLE: This is official.
PRINGLE: Objection overruled.
A Foreign Affair
Words by Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, and Richard L. Breen
Pictures by Charles B. Lang and Billy Wilder
A Foreign Affair is available on DVD from Universal Entertainment.
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